Hillsdale College has scheduled a network outage Dec. 26 and 27 to replace the college’s network core and distribution nodes.
During the outage, campus servers won’t provide connection to the internet.
All cloud services, including Zoom, Outlook, Box, CRM, Canvas, and Mazévo, will still be available to students from off-campus-networks.
“Other than a handful of students that don’t go home during Christmas break, the only other main people that are impacted by this outage will be the president himself and his family at their residence,” said Patrick Chartrand, senior director of information technology infrastructure and support. “Broadlawn will not have internet during this time, either.”
Hillsdale College’s network is composed of three layers: the core, the distribution, and the edge. The network outage will replace the core and distribution layers, according to Chartrand.
“The core layer is fault-tolerant and located in two different buildings and our main data centers,” Chartrand said. “The distribution layer is in five different locations in the distribution nodes are the only things allowed to talk to the core.”
The edge layer is made of numerous switches located in each campus building. Computers and wireless access points are connected to the edge layer, which in turn are plugged directly into the distribution layer. Each layer needs to be changed every seven years.
Chartrand explained that the college thought Christmas break would cause the least disruption. They will begin on Dec. 26 and hope to finish by Dec. 27, according to Chartrand. If there is a problem with the new layers and they do not connect properly, Chartrand’s team will remove the new layers and reinstate the old layers on Dec. 28.
“So my team will go in the day after Christmas, the 26th, to get everything implemented and up and running. If we have any trouble — maybe one of the cores has a hardware failure and it doesn’t come online, or some part of the configuration won’t work, we will need to go back to the vendor,” Chartrand said. “If that becomes the case, then that next day, that third day, we will back out and put the original equipment back in place.”
This timing will allow the college’s network to be up and running again for the gift processors to log end-of-year donations, regardless of whether the new layers work or not, according to Chartrand.
“The month of December is one of the busiest for the Gift Processing team, due to an influx of year-end gifts from the College’s generous supporters and friends. Since this month is exceptionally busy, we have coordinated the timing of the network outage with ITS to ensure that our ability to process gifts is not adversely impacted,” Sarah Grablick, a director in Campaign & Data Management, said.
The current network is supplied by Dell, but Dell recently announced it will stop making this type of edge switches.
Chartrand explained that it is preferable that all of the switches are made by the same vendor, so the college needed to decide on a new vendor.
After several meetings and tests, they settled on Juniper to supply the core, distribution, and edge switches.
Since the edge layers are installed building by building, they are replaced on a different cycle than the core and distribution layers.
The edge layers are also less vital to the integrity of the system and will thus not be replaced until they reach the end of their seven year life.
“It will take us about six years to replace the entire network for Hillsdale College from Dell over to Juniper,” Chartrand said.
Dean of Men Aaron Petersen said he is sure the update will be successful.
“I’m very grateful for the work ITS puts in behind the scenes to make sure campus runs smoothly,” Petersen said. “They do such a good job, most of us won’t even realize there was an outage in the first place.”
