Colleagues,

I wanted to alert you, as part of our summer work plan, that a secondary server facility was activated last week.  The primary server facility in Hutchins remains, but is now replicating continuously to servers across campus at the Telecommunications Center in Bruce Trades.  This creates a new level of redundancy in our technology architecture designed to protect our information assets, minimize system downtime, and assure the college can recover quickly from a disaster event.  This work involved a complex orchestration of changes to both our network and server topology with outside engineers working along-side IS&S staff to establish this new configuration affecting over 80 servers managed by three large host computers at each facility.  This new configuration will also allow us to move server applications to different hosts so hardware maintenance can be performed without campus disruption.

We have an ambitious project plan this summer but wanted to take a minute to share this milestone and extend my sincere appreciation to all involved in this work.  I would like to especially thank Perry Ingram and Randy Ellis for their contributions and long hours to achieve this milestone.  Kam Tarkington was instrumental in solving several key technical issues as we drew closer to project deadlines.  Our attention is now turning to our Banner systems where Albert and Bill will work with a new team to establish similar redundancy within our Banner Oracle architecture.  That work is now underway and funded through a grant.  Finally, I am alerting Sara Clements that NSA-4 titled “Vmware Security – Vmware Redundancy” in the Crowe Horwath audit has been addressed.

These are important steps we are taking together as we grow more reliant on a broad range of information and communication systems used across our campus community.