In August 2011,
Tropical Storm Irene
knocked out power to the University of New Haven's campus for days.
In October, an unprecedented snowstorm knocked the university's
Internet services out for the entire weekend.
Since then, the Office of Information
Technology and the Facilities Department have both been developing
plans to shore up the university's access to online services.
According to Director of
Networking/Systems Operations Greg Bartholomew, UNH learned a
valuable lesson from the one-two punch of 2011's storms.
“Just because you haven't had an
outage for ten years doesn't mean you won't have one,” he says.
Bartholomew and Associate Vice
President of OIT Vincent P. Mangiacapra are looking at a number of
different solutions in case of another outage.
The best short-term solution,
Mangiacapra says, is to put generator hookups into Echlin and Maxcy
halls, the two main sources for the university's data networks.
Director of Facilities Louis Annino
agrees. Right now, he says, the only extra source of power for the
department is a type of battery-based backup called an
Uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS.
The primary purpose of a UPS, says
Annino, is to make sure that a data center has “clean power” -
that is, to protect the system from voltage dips.
“Voltage dips happen all the time,”
he says. “You see it when the lights in a room dim for a second. It
could just be a squirrel or a bird on the power lines, or a tree that
touches them. If you filter your power through a UPS, though, you
won't see those dips.”
The other function of a UPS is to
generate power for enough time to allow a controlled shutdown of a
data system if there is an extended loss of outside power. But the
UPS can only do this on a scale of minutes - not the hours that an
emergency generator can provide.
An emergency generator hookup installed
on the exterior of Echlin Hall would give the OIT the ability to rent
a generator and have it running within a few hours of an outage, says
Annino. However, it would not do much for anyone who had lost power
in a different building.
Another plan OIT hopes to implement
over the coming months involves moving the web servers and other
critical servers to a “safe harbor” in Springfield, Mass.
Mangiacapra says the department would probably make the move in
incremental steps.
“The first step would be to really
plan out how network connectivity will happen in that location,” he
says. “Once that's straightened out, we will move our web server
there. That will ensure that everyone will still be able to access
newhaven.edu as normal from outside the university even if there's a
problem here.”
Next, he says, OIT would develop a plan
to move a secondary Microsoft Exchange server to the site that will
mirror the current on-campus server. “If we do have an issue here
it will fail-over to that location for (staff) email,” he says.
After that, OIT would consider doing
the same for Blackboard. Mangiacapra is not sure whether the move
could include Tegrity, the multimedia platform, because it takes up
so much storage space.
Bartholomew says that the maintenance
costs after the move would likely only include a $400 monthly charge
for electricity. Other costs would be negligible because the
Massachusetts site is already used by the
Connecticut EducationNetwork, a consortium to which UNH currently belongs.
“We're finalizing the hardware costs
now for how much storage we would need to replicate what we have
here,” he says.
Bartholomew thinks that the move could
begin as early as May, after the equipment has been bought and
tested. The process would continue through the summer.
Mangiacapra says that the plan has
already been informally finalized, but that he still needs to bring
to it to President Steven H. Kaplan and the other administrative
officers for their final approval.
“I don't think there will be any
opposition to it, because it's not very costly,” he adds.
The move, says Mangiacapra, is becoming
especially important because of the growth of online classes as part
of UNH's course offerings.
“Someone in another state, another
country, another continent is maybe not going to know that we had a
snowstorm,” he says.
The Facilities Department and OIT have
also begun early discussions for a long-term project that would move
the data centers to a centralized location on the main campus. It
would be a costly and complicated move. But Annino says that it fits
with a larger goal that he has of integrating the campus electrical
grid.
The cut-off of power that Echlin
experienced in October was a reflection of how UNH has been built up.
It began with only two main buildings: Maxcy Hall and the Gate House.
As each new building was erected, it was connected to outside power
by a single, separate line.
“The buildings are by and large fed
directly from the street,” with few exceptions, says Annino.
In the case of the October snowstorm,
the separation of these lines meant that even though the rest of
UNH's main campus still had power, Echlin remained in the dark. And
as long as Echlin remained dark, the rest of the campus had no
connectivity to online services.
Annino says he would like to include a
dedicated data center in the design of a future building. He would
also like to get an electrical substation for the campus and re-feed
electricity across the campus, including the data systems, through
that. A substation, he says, would take in power from two outside
feeds.
“That way,” he says, “if you lose
the feed from Campbell Avenue, the alternative feed could handle the
load.”
Annino acknowledges that the large
scale and cost of these projects means that they probably will take a
number of years to implement. However, he says, they are becoming
more and more important as UNH expands.
“This is a small but growing campus,
and now we're pushing medium-sized,” he adds.
