John W. Manly

Director of the Systems & Networking Group

Phone: 413-542-2641
E-mail: jwmanly@amherst.edu
Office: Rm B15 Converse Hall

Departmental Responsibilities:
  The SNG Department within IT handles most of the back-end servers and IT services at the College.  This includes E-mail, file servers, Blackboard, OneCard, Video Furnace, SQL Servers (both MS SQL and MySQL), web servers other than the CMS, the College's high-performance computing cluster, our interactive Unix systems, as well as many others.  SNG currently maintains over 250 server instances (over 100 physical boxes, the remainder virtual servers deployed via VMWare), and over 300 TB of storage.

SNG also administers most of the higher-level networking infrastructure at Amherst including network and server monitoring, DHCP and DNS servers, authentication services, RADIUS, WINS, VPN, Citrix, iSCSI SAN, and network registration.

In partnership with TNG (the Telecommmunications and Networking Group), SNG also helps maintain the College's wired and wireless networks, as well as our connection the Five College fiber ring and our Internet and Internet II services.

Education: BA in Mathematics from Amherst College in 1985.

Background:  I began working for the Amherst Academic Computer Center in 1981 during my freshman year at Amherst as a student worker.  After graduation in 1985 I became the VAX Systems Manager, then Assistant Director, then finally Acting Director of the Center in 1996.  Following a major reorganization of IT in 1998, I became co-Director of the Systems, Networking and Telecommunications (SNT) group until another minor reorganization in 2006 separated the functions of the Systems and Telecommunications groups.

Since 2006 I have been the Director of the Systems & Networking Group (SNG).  The  Systems Group began with a single other employee in 1998 and currently has a staff of five in addition to myself.