Datacenter Shutdown and Upgrade

To strengthen the availability of University applications and protect critical data, a generator and an upgraded UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system are being installed at the central Northwestern University Information Technology (NUIT) Datacenter in June.

With respect to the summer session calendar, work on this project is scheduled to begin at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, June 25 and end at noon Sunday, June 26. The project will result in an unavoidable interruption of online University services for up to 18 hours.

Functions such as e-mail (including bulkmail and listservs), the Library's Voyager System, Northwestern's Web sites (including Plan-it Purple), Meeting Maker, HRIS, CAESAR, and the Course Management System will be unavailable during that time. School and departmental servers and research systems housed at the central Datacenter will also be affected.

Although the actual length of service interruption may be shorter, NUIT recommends that users plan for the full implementation window.

The installation requires that all electrical equipment be powered off at the Datacenter. During this time, there will be no power supplied to offices, computers, office equipment or house lighting in the Datacenter or to University departments in the building.

The project will result in an unavoidable interruption of online University services for up to 18 hours beginning on Saturday, June 25, at 6:00 p.m. and ending on Sunday, June 26, at 12 noon. Major University services affected include:

• Central E-mail (casbah, hecky, lulu, and merle), including WebMail
• Northwestern.edu Web applications and Web pages
• NETID / Active Directory / LDAP system
• WildCARD system
• Student Enterprise System/CAESAR (SES)
• Electronic Time Entry System (ETES)
• Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)
• College and University Financial System (CUFS)
• Voyager System (University Library)
• Course Management System (CMS)
• Departmental and school Web, application, and database servers housed at the Datacenter
• Resource25 and CTEC Student Systems
• Alumni BSR Advance System
• Research systems housed at the Datacenter
• Ecommerce
• Student Loan System
• Meeting Maker
• Social Science Computing Cluster
• Research Data Integration and Access (RDIA)
• Collaboratory System

Providing reliable and secure central University computing systems even in the event of an electrical utility company outage requires the ability to protect data quickly. If an outage were to occur, the generator would provide the power needed to keep central services continuously operational.

E-mail service will be restored first on Sunday, June 26. As additional services become available, they will be posted to the nwu-comp-announce listserv and to NUIT's Status of University Services page.

Please direct questions regarding the service outage to it-communications@northwestern.edu .