2008 Woodie Awards
Campus e-mail service to undergo overhaul
Cassie Rupp
Issue date: 12/7/06 Section: Front Page
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A campus-wide hardware failure that left college employees without e-mail service Nov. 13-17 has been fixed for the time being.
"[We] don't want to do the full-blown replacement until after finals are in. I don't want to take the chance to lose anything that might be coming into instructors," said Mary Wilson, director of information technology.
Until then, e-mail is running on a temporary server. According to Wilson, following last month's hard drive crash, the information technology department was able to recover data from back-ups, which allowed them to restore information contained in each employee's mailbox.
The cost of getting e-mail back up following the hardware malfunction was more than $11,000 which included the necessary software to recover data as well as the vendor who was hired to install the new system and begin the recovery process of existing tape backup.
"The first thing we knew about the first drive going down is that our back-ups started to fail," Wilson said. "It wouldn't finish the backup process. That's when we started searching for the technology we had at the time in the server."
As a precaution, back-ups are performed on a daily basis, according to Terry Chastain, network manager. Chastain said the back-ups are performed each night, Monday through Friday.
Chastain explained that because the back-up application was running on the same machine as e-mail, the data was compromised. However, the he was able to restore the data from the back-up tapes.
"All files, documents, stuff like that, we back up to a tape. It's a physical tape, like a cassette tape. Just like you would copy some data from your computer to a CD," Chastain said. "Same concept as you copying data to a CD that's what back-up software does."
A generic configuration had been used as the exchange server and was tailored to meet the college's needs at that time. It will be replaced with a Hewlett Packard server.
College officials purchased two HP servers for e-mail storage at a value of approximately $9,000.
"[We] don't want to do the full-blown replacement until after finals are in. I don't want to take the chance to lose anything that might be coming into instructors," said Mary Wilson, director of information technology.
Until then, e-mail is running on a temporary server. According to Wilson, following last month's hard drive crash, the information technology department was able to recover data from back-ups, which allowed them to restore information contained in each employee's mailbox.
The cost of getting e-mail back up following the hardware malfunction was more than $11,000 which included the necessary software to recover data as well as the vendor who was hired to install the new system and begin the recovery process of existing tape backup.
"The first thing we knew about the first drive going down is that our back-ups started to fail," Wilson said. "It wouldn't finish the backup process. That's when we started searching for the technology we had at the time in the server."
As a precaution, back-ups are performed on a daily basis, according to Terry Chastain, network manager. Chastain said the back-ups are performed each night, Monday through Friday.
Chastain explained that because the back-up application was running on the same machine as e-mail, the data was compromised. However, the he was able to restore the data from the back-up tapes.
"All files, documents, stuff like that, we back up to a tape. It's a physical tape, like a cassette tape. Just like you would copy some data from your computer to a CD," Chastain said. "Same concept as you copying data to a CD that's what back-up software does."
A generic configuration had been used as the exchange server and was tailored to meet the college's needs at that time. It will be replaced with a Hewlett Packard server.
College officials purchased two HP servers for e-mail storage at a value of approximately $9,000.
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