By SHANNON O. WELLS
Virtually everyone who works at Pitt is connected to, if not dependent on, an elaborate digital network that — in providing myriad services via WiFi or hard-wired internet service — involves a complex infrastructure of specialized equipment and components, multiple provider contracts, and the steadily rising costs of system software licensing, maintenance and replacement costs.
As Mark Henderson, Pitt’s chief information officer, reminded Faculty Assembly at its April 15 meeting in Posvar Hall, all this effort and expense is secondary to Pitt’s core mission.
“In the grand scheme of things, to you, the University’s business is not to run the network,” he said. “It’s really to teach, to support faculty, to support students, to do outreach, to do research. And what we at Pitt Digital do is in support of that, to enable — to the best of our abilities — the work that you all do.”
That’s how Henderson framed his presentation on Pitt Digital’s initiative to evaluate long-running practices with an eye to adopting a potentially more sustainable network-as-a-service model. This includes assessing costs and various pros and cons of hiring vendors to replace or further augment operations currently handled in-house.
“One of the things that we’ve been evaluating, because of escalating costs, is how do we best provide services to the University community that we are here to support in ways that are sustainable,” he said, as in Pitt’s ongoing ability to efficiently purchase and manage essential services. “We started looking at network-as-a-service.”
This refers to the system that Pitt community members connect to in their offices or through the wireless campus network.
“We’re evaluating this today because costs continue to escalate,” he said, noting the University is largely affiliated with Cisco technology for digital connectivity services, and “our maintenance costs go up every year.”
Also, licensing costs for the software that run the network, along with network elements such as wireless access points and controllers, switches, routers and security-related components “continue to escalate year over year.”
Historically, Pitt has purchased its network equipment from Cisco, but Henderson expressed uncertainty that the University is well positioned for the ongoing maintenance and refreshing of networking equipment, “particularly in the context of escalating costs,” he noted. “We’re seeing hardware costs increase (and) demand on the network continue to increase.”
With aging network hardware and actual life expectancy of equipment between three and five years, he said Pitt Digital will “try to squeeze more out of these things.”
Holding up a wireless access point component manufactured by Cisco in October 2022, Henderson noted that the company no longer supports the device, which won’t work with its new controllers or switches. “We have thousands of wireless access ports.”
Changing to network-as-a-service, he suggested, would “make more sense” for Pitt to keep “our capital dollars free” for addressing classroom-related needs and improvements, acquiring residence halls to accommodate a growing incoming class, and “any number of things that we would be better served than spending (on) something (with) a useful life of three to five years.”
Henderson shared a diagram illustrating what the current campus network landscape — including administration- and classroom-oriented buildings — looks like.
Through wireless access points in administration buildings, “we have devices, and all of these connect to switches,” he explained, adding that most switches “connect to a very large set of routers in the Cathedral (of Learning).”
Traffic from these “end devices” transmits to networks that Pitt Digital currently manages. “Because we do not provide connectivity all the way, end-to-end for access to the various systems and solutions that our University community utilizes in our everyday life.”
Pitt therefore relies on vendors including Salesforce, Internet2, DQE Communications, Crown Castle and AT&T to “actually carry the traffic that we offer to the end solutions that are required to do our work,” he said.
The University has partnered for the past several years with Bolden Consulting to support connectivity in Pitt’s residence halls.
“They have done a very good job in assisting our students,” Henderson said, including during the (COVID) pandemic, when students spent considerably more time in their dorm rooms and homes. “Bolden, of their own accord, were able to upgrade the speeds for network connectivity to those points as part of our increasing needs.”
Pitt Digital proposes investigating benefits associated with “having the network managed by an outfit whose primary job is doing this,” he said. “They focus on it, they optimize it, they support it.”
As part of the service, they would upgrade equipment as needed within the footprint of the service, “somewhere in the neighborhood of five-to-seven years for a service of this nature.”
Cost effectiveness
Pitt’s various schools use a range of service providers, including Coursera and Everspring, while Pitt Digital relies on a company called Infrastructure along with Dell for storage needs.
“They’ll ratchet it up when we need it or manage it when it needs to be replaced. We do the same thing with something called VMware, which allows for virtualization of various servers in the data center,” he said.
While Pitt Digital provides network connectivity for residence halls and the Petersen Events Center, “we rely heavily on Red Hat” for support services.
The same goes for cloud-based services through companies like AWS, Microsoft Azure storage, and Sales Force. “We run very (few) enterprise services on campus,” he said, adding that Oracle business and human resources systems “are all cloud natives, so we acquire them as services. It’s just a continuation of a trend.”
Potential benefits include modernizing Pitt’s “aging fleet” of network equipment and “basically having a simplified environment,” he noted, comparing the situation to his home TV service. “I have no idea what the network looks like that allows my television to be served the content that I’m interested in viewing. That is all as a service, and there’s a very significant network behind (it) serving up content.”
Henderson also touted the advantages of predictable year-to-year expenses, illustrating his point by holding up a wireless access point device. “They’re about $700 a piece, but because we buy 3,000-or-4,000 of them, that sheer number becomes a capitalizable expenditure, but the useful life, again, is between three and five years.”
When a wireless passage device conks out, it’s sent to Cisco, which delivers a brand new one, if it’s still under warranty. A tiny optical converter box, which converts an input from optical to copper, “which is all the wiring in our offices … alone costs $34,000.
“This is no longer being manufactured,” he explained. “On the open market, we might get $300 for it, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense … to invest $34,000.”
Noting that Pitt has more “pressing things to spend our treasure on,” he said the University is unable to pay the same kinds of salaries as network providers, making them better able to attract and retain top-tier expertise.
“Because they do it as their core competency, they’re able to achieve efficiencies that we don’t, and it’s more cost effective over time than our current approach.”
Questions of cost and security
Responding to a question about what stops Pitt from choosing, say, Libre Office instead of the more costly Microsoft package, and avoid being beholden to some company’s rising prices, Henderson said, “We’re exploring all opportunities to do things in a more considered fashion.
“And part of that … is coming before this group, and letting you know what we’re considering, and receiving your feedback to help us inform our decision making,” he noted, relaying an experience from his earlier days at Case Western Reserve University when a switch from Microsoft to Google Mail saved “a ton of money.” Students prior to the switch opted not to use the mailboxes provided. “They were forwarding mail to … other providers, Google in particular.”
“We’re going to evaluate all reasonable opportunities (to maximize investments) the University is making in these technologies to support our faculty, students and staff.”
To a question about the evaluation’s timeline and implementation, Henderson said Pitt Digital is currently looking at network-as-a-service model infrastructure options.
Most current services don’t really “at a campus level, run on campus. They’re above the campus, so (running it ourselves is) not even an option in many instances,” he said. “So, we’re starting to look at what our opportunities are, what makes some sense, and what then becomes our communications mechanisms to get it in front of the community, to gain feedback.”
“We’re going to start looking at all of these things over the next several months, and it will be highly considered before we implement anything.”
John Stoner, teaching professor in the Department of History, questioned Henderson’s assertion that Pitt could save money using a private, for-profit company that pays its employees more than Pitt. “My logical assumption would be, then, that the service they (provide) would actually be significantly more expensive despite economies of scale. And I didn’t know if you could possibly address … where we might actually see savings?”
Henderson provided the example of switching to an outsourced vendor model for the IT help desk in mid-2025.
“There were cost savings associated with that because, although it’s a for-profit service provider, the economies of scale that they were able to achieve actually made the overall service less expensive than what we were doing ourselves,” he explained, adding measurements of performance and availability “have been greater than what we were experiencing when we were doing the help desk ourselves.”
When asked how many Pitt employees could potentially be impacted by switching to outside vendors, Henderson said, “We’re early in our evaluation right now, and more importantly, I rely on direction from our HR and legal community on those kinds of things.”
Regarding concerns about network vulnerability with an outside vendor, Henderson said Pitt spends “a lot of money” on network management technology — systems that provide intelligence regarding performance, availability and management of the network — and other ancillary tools that allow Pitt to measure security levels. “All of those things are baked into a network as a service model.”
Many tools are utilized in what he called a “very large network operation center” across which costs are “liquidated against all of the clients,” not just Pitt as it runs the network today.
A network-as-a-service model would likely provide what Henderson called a “greater thwarting of vulnerabilities” as vendors provide a “true 24/7, 365 monitoring and management capability,” he said, adding that a service vendor would not peruse Pitt IP addresses. “They will not be able to review emails or any of the kinds of things that we enjoy, from a privacy perspective, with us running it ourselves.”
Henderson added that Cisco Systems, “arguably the biggest network equipment provider in the world” doesn’t even run its own corporate network. “They have farmed that out to network-as-a-service providers for them.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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