April 2006

Overview of Test Plan and fair warning about downtimes and affected services

ITS is engaged in extensive tests of what we refer to as "Colo." This is to insure that the Business Continuity plan will really, actually, work the day it is called upon. There are several phases, and currently we are doing tests of the co-located services one-by-one. Next we progress to testing the complex dependencies between databases and web servers, mail servers and automatic mailing lists and all the rest.

As the tests progress there may be slow downs of certain services we provide. This is true both of the speed of our computers and the availability of our Network Staff.

Also, we will need to interrupt some services on main campus from time to time. Of course, you will receive plenty of notice when this is going to happen.

The final phase of testing, at the beginning of the Hurricane season, will be a full dress rehearsal that we refer to as "Hurricane Pam." This will be a complete shutdown of our main campus servers and a test period running off the Alternate servers -- for real, as it were. You can expect plenty of warning and plenty of details before we 'flip the switch.'

Article by: Walter Moore