On the evening of Friday September 18, 2009 OIT will be upgrading a piece of core storage area network (SAN) infrastructure causing many services to be unavailable for several hours. This outage is necessary because of a firmware flaw in one of our disk arrays. Services affected will include: Banner, Blackboard, Email, my.pdx.edu, and www.pdx.edu.
In just under 6 weeks OIT (with help from HATS IT) was able migrate the old card access server environment to brand new servers. The old card access system was in sad shape, running on an old Windows NT 4 domain without proper backups, anti-virus, or patching. The new servers will keep us all more secure, and allow some to sleep better at night.
Webmail has a new interface that allows for drag/drop, right-clicking, etc. To try the new interface, browse to https://webmail.pdx.edu, and change the Mode drop down box from Traditional to Dynamic. Internet Explorer 8 users will need to turn on the "Compatibility View" to use the Dynamic interface: Tools -> Compatibility View.
The Office of Information Technologies is currently in the process of informally evaluating hosted email and collaboration suites. With a hosted solution, our email and other collaboration tools (i.e. calendaring, tasks, etc) would be run and managed on servers in a remote data center. Hardware, operating system, and application maintenance are all handled by the hosting provider. Account provisioning and other troubleshooting is still the responsibility of the customer.
The numbers keep getting bigger, OIT is now running over 50 production virtual machines in our data center! Server virtualization technology allows us to run several server operating systems on one physical machine. This has several benefits, including: 1) reduced hardware costs, 2) reduced power usage, and 3) increased manageability. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand our virtualization footprint.
After several years of weekly meetings and thousands of labor hours, the Odin Account Manager (OAM) is now in production at https://oam.pdx.edu. It may not seem like much on the surface, but this new system will keep user names, passwords, and other data synchronized across several large computing systems that faculty, staff, and students use every day. If you are an existing employee or student at PSU, check it out at https://oam.pdx.edu and "OAM" yourself.
Winter break is one of the busiest times of the year for us. We've got several upgrades in the works this break to make your computing resources more secure, reliable, and fast! These include updates for Webmail, Mailman (yourlist@lists.pdx.edu), Request Tracker (RT), directory services, account management, MySQL, and the data center firewall.
Databases, applications, and plain old files have a never ending thirst for more space and horsepower to meet the needs of PSU's growing population of faculty, staff, and students. To meet these needs our storage team has been working tirelessly all summer long to prepare a new disk array that will hand all of the database needs for our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.
Our existing web site architecture has been around for many years and it's time for an upgrade! Look for more reliability and faster site access this Fall when we roll out our new web services infrastructure.
Our datacenter is only a few years old, but we're already using up all of the power designated for PSU departmental use. Our engineers are working with Facilities and Planning to add additional capacity to the co-location (departmental) datacenter so departments can continue to maintain and expand services for the PSU community.
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