While students were away on spring break, the Technology Infrastructure Department was on the Mount Carmel Campus, completing some important maintenance to the data center.
The team was replacing the primary UPS, or uninterruptible power supply, in the center. The UPS is essentially a backup battery to keep the data center running incase of a power outage.
This data center is responsible for running systems like Self Service, Q Cards, Transact and printing. In the case of a power outage, some of those systems could failover to the other data center at the North Haven Campus.
But, the Director of Technology Infrastructure, John Scott doesn’t like to rely on that.
“Because it was a planned outage…we were able to fail most services over to North Haven,” he said. “On an unexpected outage, there is a potential for things to be impacted.”
An outage could impact some services that rely on the cloud instead of the data center, such as the Microsoft Office Suite or Zoom. Scott says these services rely on wifi which the center runs through.
“The data centers are always critical when it comes to our network,” he said. “If we couldn’t keep the network services up, the entire campus would not be able to connect. So it doesn’t matter where the services are hosted. If you have no network, you’re going to be down and out.”
The team noticed the need for a replacement UPS when the current one began showing error messages.
“It was generating errors for the last couple of weeks and working with the vendor and our support company, determined that they just weren’t comfortable with the errors we were getting,” Scott said.
The vendor shipped out a replacement, which the team installed on March 12.
Power outages experienced on campus this year also showed how important a backup battery is.
“It didn’t help in terms of our comfort level, because we were already having some of those errors show up,” Scott said. “It probably changed our sense of urgency.”
The team installed the last UPS in 2001, and it only failed 24 years later; it is safe to assume this one will keep the data center running for years to come.
