From: Bates, Ren (Bluegrass)

Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 11:32 PM

To: Kolasa, James R (Bluegrass); Williams, Laura A (Bluegrass)

Cc: Hellmich, David M (Bluegrass); King, Richard N (Bluegrass); Birch, Timothy (Bluegrass)

Subject: RE: Blackboard Update: December 9

James and all,

When I last spoke with Ken Burdine (Windstream engineer) and Charles Bynaker, the KCTCS Network Engineer, they both assured me that KCTCS redundant network paths have since been established at the Center for Rural Development site.  Rick Chlopan, the KCTCS CIO also addressed the issue in a recent meeting of the statewide KCTCS IT contact and I can assure you that Rick received extensive grilling from the college IT personnel due to the outages we experienced last year.

As for the local network, Ray Forsythe and I recently met with local Windstream personnel in late November 2010 to request a network bandwidth increase at all BCTC sites. The decision to upgrade the BCTC bandwidth was based on real time network usage statistics provided by Windstream.  Since there were a few occasions during the fall semester that the Cooper network capacity neared the 80 to 100 % utilization threshold levels, an immediate network upgrade was  we arranged for our Metro E and KPEN links. These upgrades should have gone into effect some time in December. Windstream also agreed to provide access to their network Cisco network monitoring utilities so our local BCTC ITS networking staff can now monitor our network usage statistics at real time.      

As I recall the Cooper KPEN connection was increased to 1 GB from 100 mbps and the Regency and Leestown metro E connections were both been increased to 50 mbps.  I will copy Ray Forsythe on this reply in case I missed anything.

If you want to discuss the recent upgrades or have any general concerns regarding the BCTC network either Ray or I will be happy to meet with you.  I will have to defer to either Charles Bynaker or Rick Chlopan regarding the statewide KPEN configuration although I feel certain that Charles will be willing to discuss the status of the KCTCS network with you at any time.

Please let me know if I can help.

Thanks,

Ren