Students and staff were temporarily left without access to UNH’s online resources by the unprecedented Oct. 29 snowstorm that swept across Connecticut. The power to Echlin Hall, where UNH’s Data Center is housed, went out at approximately 3:00 p.m. Saturday, according to Associate Vice President of the Department of Information Technology Vincent P. Mangiacapra. The servers were not completely restored until Monday morning.
When the outage was discovered, Mangiacapra said his office immediately called United Illuminating to make sure that repairs to Echlin were given high priority by the utility company. The department sent an email to the students through the Windows Live email service at 4:59 p.m. notifying them that they would not be able to access Matrix, Blackboard, faculty and staff email, insideUNH and other programs.
Students who were off-campus or accessing their email via mobile devices were still able to use the Windows Live service because it is operated separately by Microsoft. Professors, including those off campus, could not access their email, because their accounts are part of the network handled by the university’s servers.
Mangiacapra said he received an email around 3:00 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 31 notifying him that UI had restored power to Echlin Hall. The Data Center took several more hours to get running again, however. The power breakers had to be checked to avoid a surge of electricity that could destroy the computer equipment, according to Mangiacapra. “We wanted to make sure the servers came on in an orderly fashion,” he said.
By 8:30 a.m., the Data Center was fully online. Blackboard continued to have intermittent problems over the following days, but Mangiapra was unsure if it had any relation to the storm. Some students were barely affected by the outage. Michael Torgersen, a forensic science major, said he did not have any problems. “It was mostly chance, though,” he said. “I didn’t have anything due.”
Other students did experience setbacks in their schoolwork. Music industry and communication major Krystal Pelaez was working on a marketing project for an online internship that was due that Monday. She was unable to do the research or even contact anyone until 12 hours before the work was due. “I was panicking,” she said. Fortunately, she was later given an extension to complete her assignment.
Jennifer Banks, a communication major, said she found a way to work around the outage. She does not live on campus and had access to the Internet at home. She had an assignment that involved watching a film, and had gotten the information she needed from Blackboard prior to the outage. She was able to find the film elsewhere.
UNH has been hit by multiple major storms in 2011, including Tropical Storm Irene in August, that have caused power outages. The Data Center currently has no backup option if it loses power. Mangiacapra said his office is looking at various ways to build redundancy into the system to protect it from prolonged problems in the future. “We want to understand a number of scenarios,” he said. “We really need to firm up a disaster recourse plan that can be realistically implemented.” Mangiacapra hopes to have a recommendation to bring to UNH’s president by early next semester.