Hillsdale College’s Information Technology Services rescheduled a planned upgrade of the campus network to the beginning of spring break.
While cloud services, such as Canvas and email, will be unaffected, the campus internet connection and college servers will be unavailable the weekend of March 14–15.
The planned outage of the network’s distribution and core equipment was originally scheduled for the two days following Christmas, The Collegian previously reported. However, ITS ran into compatibility issues with the Dell switches that bring network connectivity to campus buildings, according to Senior Director of IT Infrastructure and Support Pat Chartrand.
“There were some configuration mishaps that we needed to work through,” Chartrand said. “The distribution nodes wouldn’t communicate with the Dell switches, so we had to figure out why that was.”
Due to these concerns, Chartrand made the decision to reschedule the upgrade to make sure the network would stay available.
“Our business is to provide the network at a very high availability level without interrupting services. So when that did not meet the threshold for providing excellent service to the campus, he made a no-go decision,” said Timothy Post, IT Operations Manager. “The upgrade didn’t fail. Part of the project plan has a go or no-go for implementing the system.”
Chartrand said his primary concern was ensuring that end-of-year gifts could be processed in a timely manner.
“The most important was gift processors,” Chartrand said. “People give donations to Hillsdale College with the anticipation that they’re going to get a receipt for that to be able to file taxes now.”
The new date was chosen specifically to minimize the impact to the college community.
“When we look at these calendar events for a massive outage like this, we’re checking with finance, we’re checking with the deans, we’re checking with the sports complex,” Chartrand said. “Most students are going to be gone. We’re not going to be impacting the faculty. The only people who are going to care are the staff, but we’re picking Saturday and Sunday. Unless they’re really busy, needing to work Saturday and Sunday, they’re not going to be impacted by this.”
Chartrand said he is confident that the upgrade will be successful this time, due to his team’s advance preparation.
“Configurationally, we’re ready to go,” Chartrand said. “We can deploy it today. We’re actually bringing it up alongside our existing environment. A lot of the equipment’s already staged. When it comes time, we think we’re going to be able to do it in one day as opposed to two.”
That said, the changes are large enough that the network will still have to go down temporarily.
“We’re redoing how everything is interconnected with fiber,” Chartrand said. “It’s five of these distribution nodes plus two cores that we’re replacing. We have to repatch a bunch of fiber optic patch cables.”
However, Chartrand said he believes that the new system will improve the network connection between computers and switches on campus.
“The new stuff is bigger, better, faster, stronger, which is going to be great for anything that’s here on campus,” Chartrand said.
