ITS has implemented infrastructure changes to permit high availability capabilities for our services.
Contemporary IT system and service robustness is best accomplished through a three tier model consisting of 1) effective design and professional practices 2) high availability through infrastructure and operating diversity 3) disaster recovery as an insurance strategy using an external vendor specialist. The first strategy has been our historical approach and the organization is actively pursuing the third strategy. ITS has added high availability capability by implementing custom network connectivity between our primary data center in Gant and our secondary machine room in HBL. This multi-site data center capability allows us to deliver virtualized services from two independent locations as a single extended offering.
Our primary data center in Gant will undergo disruptive upgrades to both power and environmentals this weekend that will result in a 12-18 hour loss of services from this location. By diversifying a number of our generically consumed services between our paired data centers using our new high availability infrastructure, UTIS will be maintaining the following services without substantive interruption during the upgrades to the Gant data center.
- Networking (wired and wireless)
- Email (Microsoft Exchange)
- Authentication (NetID, AD, Radius, CAS, etc)
- Departmental web content management (Aurora)
- University core websites (alert, it status, today, uconn)
Delivery from the secondary HBL location will begin almost immediately as the primary delivery location is shutdown. Any disruption of these services during failover will be extremely brief and should be virtually unnoticed. Outages have an increasingly disruptive impact on our community and we will continue to pursue high availability as well as other architectural and operational strategies to improve the performance and stability of ITS systems and services.