[PLUG] Why are PSU network services...

[Daniel Herrington]

Michael,

I think you're confusing two concepts, namely DR and HA. Secondary data 
centers exist for Disaster Recovery, or Business Continuity, purposes. 
They have redundancy of the enterprise network, data, and application 
services. HA is simply duplicated services within the same network 
environment (dual routers, nics, Oracle RAC, dual application servers, 
etc.). Having worked in corporate enterprise environments for the last 
10 years, I can tell you most environments don't have DR and not all 
environments are highly available. It definitely depends on the 
criticality of those systems to the core business and the costs to the 
business of building and maintaining that infrastructure. I'd be 
surprised if PSU didn't have HA for it's core critical systems such as 
database services, financial applications, etc. For less critical 
systems (ie, publicly accessible network, library computers, essentially 
most of the systems that you as a 'user' use), IT managers will choose 
to inconvenience you with an outage window. The cost to support an HA 
environment for all users is prohibitive. DR for those systems is simply 
out of the question.

In the case of the network having no DR site, it's standard in most 
environments, if not all environments, to have outage windows for 
maintenance. Even the most Highly Available applications take outage 
windows for migrations, patches, etc. that are deemed critical to the 
infrastructure. If this is an annual event at PSU (I've never seen their 
network), they probably plan major upgrades or patching during this period.

It's also possible that with all the work, they are upgrading/improving 
the network infrastructure and they need to take the outage to bring the 
new systems on line.

Dan H.

Michael Robinson wrote:
> going to be down on November 20?  Shouldn't PSU have a high 
> availability set up?  OHSU for patient records uses a hidden 
> off site data center that is secured.  Why doesn't PSU do this?
>
> I suppose I and anyone else who is a PSU student got an announcement
> that most services are going to be down after 7 pm on the 20th.
>
> I don't have a backup site for my DSL hosted one, but I'm not a
> University serving 1000s of people.  I'm starting to question the
> competence of PSU's IT staff where being in computer science that
> is of great concern to me.  There was a major outage not long ago.
> PSU seems to be doing construction all over campus, aren't the 
> network services being worked on too?  
>
> If you are a PSU staff person, please don't be offended.  Some of 
> you are very dedicated good professors.  Others, I honestly wonder 
> what you are doing there.  I'm not going to list any names because 
> that would be stupid and rude.
>
> If you are a PSU student, you are sinking literally thousands of
> dollars into an education that is likely going to be the foundation
> of your future career.  Some of the information in those computer
> systems is personal information.  I expect PSU to have an off site
> secured data center and I expect use of a high availability server
> configuration.  Servers should be on multiple electrical circuits
> preferably in multiple buildings, all of them secured appropriately
> depending on the level of data that they contain.  This is what I
> expect.  Am I OTL?  What is the reality at PSU?
>
> I'm increasingly wondering if I should take myself elsewhere for 
> multiple reasons, the issue of PSU's network reliability being 
> one of them.
>
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-- 
Daniel B. Herrington
Director of Field Services
Robert Mark Technologies
dherrington at robertmarktechnologies.com
o: 651-769-2574
m: 503-358-8575