This past weekend proved to be quite the headache for most faculty members who experienced an email blackout.
Although the email is running again the system has not fully recovered, according to Chief Information Officer Dr. Stephen Landry.
Landry said some faculty members are still missing emails from Wednesday Sept. 5.
Some mobile connections are still down also, according to Landry. Landry said he assures faculty that the University is working on fixing these problems.
"We still have recovery acts on the way," Landry said.
Landry said the email actually crashed more than once. The first crash happened in the early hour of Thursday, Sept. 6 in the morning precisely around 1 a.m.
According to Landry, when Information Technology looked into the problem, they found the email system was set up with various redundancies.
The redundancies found throughout the system were determined to be the cause of the crashes, at that point, said Landry. "What was unusual about it was that both the primary and the back up crashed," Landry said.
According to Microsoft, for the primary and back up to crash is a very uncommon occurrence.
Landry said the University has about 4,000 users and 3,000 were backed up on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 6.
"We had as many as four engineers working on it but we weren't able to re- store it right away," Landry said.
According to Landry, the system crashed again Thursday, Sept. 6 at night and a third time on Friday night.
"We would bring the system up and then it would crash again," Landry said.
Landry said on Saturday, Sept. 8 in the morning, they started working with the storage area network.
That is when they found out it was a net- work bug, Landry added.
The storage area network, which holds hundreds of drives and then connects them to other servers, was making an in- correct number of spaces for drives which was making the entire system crash, ac- cording to Landry.
"Once we determined that Saturday morning, we managed to restore that," Landry said.
Landry said IT have been doing recovery acts since then and are still in the process of doing recovery acts, since the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 4.
Lindsay Rittenhouse can be reached at lindsay.rittenhouse@student.shu.edu
