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Over the last several weeks, the campus has experienced a number of power
outages. During one of those outages, some parts of the campus lost phone
service and there were disruptions in voice mail services.
The equipment that supports the campus phone system is located in facilities
adjacent to the College’s power plant. During the first outage, we discovered
that after a power disruption the electrical services feeding the phone
equipment was not configured to automatically restart. When the power went off
initially the systems continued operating on UPS or stored power. When the
power came back on, phones continued to operate on the UPS, which were quickly
drained of power. This resulted in the loss of phone service. Since that
discovery, two actions have taken place. Computing Services has worked with
Facilities Operations and Management to put in place a procedure that will
insure that staff from both departments are on call to restart services.
Computing Services has also purchased additional UPS devices to further extend
the life of the phone system in the event of a prolonged power outage. The
anticipated UPS life is 45 minutes.
The repeat power outages also caused the campus voice mail system hardware
to crash several times. These repeated failures caused corruption in the
database. After initially triaging the problem, we determined that we needed
the hardware vendors support staff on campus working with Computing staff to
define the problem and get it resolved. Unfortunately, the complexity of the
problem caused it to take several days to resolve. No voice mail was lost
during this time.
Computing Services strives to provide quality of service, and we are keenly
aware of the life safety issues that are entrusted to us. We will continue to
look for opportunities to improve the reliability of the services that we
provide.
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