MyIT release includes estimated FY16 costs

A MyIT release which includes estimated monthly FY16 costs is now available.

What and When:

As of Wednesday, MyIT includes new information on the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Departments” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx. Department contacts will see 4 new columns on that page for each department representing estimated FY16 costs for desktops, group directories, home directories, and a total FY16 monthly cost. The total is side-by-side with the current monthly cost allowing for easy comparison.

NOTE: estimated are based on preliminary FY16 rates for the Nebula Managed Desktop service and are subject to Management Accounting & Analysis (MAA) review and approval.

What you need to do:

You can review your estimated costs and if necessary take actions to reduce your usage to reduce your future costs.

NOTE: Estimated home directory costs are the least accurate component. This number includes users associated with your department which are long gone. Those “old” home directories will be purged in the future after you give us an eligibility group. In the coming weeks, we plan to purge “old” home directories in bulk across all Nebula departments, removing any Nebula account not in those eligibility groups. So take this into account when reviewing the home directory estimated cost. Except for urgent user removals, we ask that you not ask us to delete “old” home directories at this time—it’ll save us all a lot of time and costs to defer that to a one-time purge. J

More info:

Getting us that eligibility group is important. If you need help getting a Groups Service home group under “uw”, e.g. “uw_pottery”, for your eligibility group, we can help streamline that process. Send us a request and we’ll facilitate the request fulfillment process with the Groups Service team for you. We’d like to purge your old home directories. Help enable us to do that. J

NOTE: the eligibility group is intended to represent any of your users which need access to Nebula resources. This would include people in your department but might also need to include accounts that are not people, such as a Shared UW NetID. If the user needs access to one of the following, then it should be included: Nebula VPN, Nebula home directory, Nebula group directory, Nebula desktop.

A future MyIT release will provide the ability to input budget information for Nebula file service costs.

In the future, after the future MyIT release just mentioned, Nebula plans to call department contacts that haven’t provided an eligibility group and budget info for Nebula file service costs, to help make sure we have that information to enable continued service.

Our existing assignment of group directories has some inflexibility in its design. We are working on a more flexible design. We don’t believe this affects a lot of customers, but it is important to us because it is important to some of you. We hope to have a solution to this before we bill at the end of July. If we don’t, we’ll provide a workaround which will minimize the impact to customers.