Do you remember “move in” weekend in the fall of 2007? I certainly do. I had been in my new job as a director in ITS for just over a month when on Saturday morning, August 25th, I got a call telling me that we had lost electrical power in the ITS building. I soon found out that construction work at the University Union dining hall expansion had cut power to ITS, six residence halls, the Gateway Center, and the University Union. It was a major crisis, with no central ITS services, no dining services at the Union, no power in those six residence halls, disruption of the dining card system, and all of this occurred on move-in weekend. Many of us at NAU worked long hours inventing and implementing backup plans until power was finally stabilized on Sunday night.
Since that weekend ITS has taken steps to prevent such an occurrence from disabling central IT services again. ITS now has a standby generator to provide electrical power for central computing and telephone services during power outages. This generator can provide a run-time minimum of 24 hours before refueling. Anticipated run times should be much longer.
In conjunction with the new generator, other upgrades to the electrical service coming into the ITS building have been completed for additional equipment to be added to the ITS computer rooms.
Critical ITS chilling plant upgrades have been completed. These upgrades were postponed for a year to take advantage of the work being completed on the north campus chilled water plant. This saved the campus the larger expenditure that was needed to complete these upgrades independently. In addition to the increased chilling capacity provided through the north campus infrastructure upgrade, the existing ITS chillers were repurposed to provide redundant capacity in the event of a north chiller plant outage.
Additional steps to save energy, resources, and money were taken. The new standby generator replaced a smaller generator that served only the telecommunication portion of ITS. The smaller generator will be reused at another network and telecom location on campus. In January ITS reorganized a large portion of the server equipment in the main computer room and the co-location room. Moving this equipment provides more efficient airflow and is a no-cost way to reduce energy costs required to cool these rooms. Finally, a yet-to-be-completed part of the project is a change to the cooling ducting for the co-location room that will also result in more efficient cooling.
These upgrades mean that it is extremely unlikely that a power or chilled water outage will interrupt ITS computing, networking, and telecommunication services. Central IT services are hosted in a highly reliable environment. It also means that other NAU departments can locate their departmental servers at ITS to get the same level of environmental reliability.
ITS offers co-location services to house departmental servers in the ITS computing facility. ITS also offers a range of other hosting services which include hosting your application on an ITS virtual server, system administration of your server, and data backup and recovery. All of these services are offered at rates far below those available from commercially provided hosting companies and are available immediately. For information about the services available and pricing, point your web browser at nau.edu/serverhosting.
