Bb Users,
Blackboard is performing emergency maintenance to replace a network switch in response to the outage we experienced on July 13th. That outage affected all of their hosted clients at their “Northern Virginia Data Center 2” facility.
The maintenance will begin at 8:00am and is expected to finish by 11:00pm. Blackboard will remain available, but periodic service interruptions may occur during that time.
They will be sending me updates, and if they provide anything beyond “We are still working…things are going well…” I will pass that information along.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and the short notice. If you would like to read Blackboard’s announcement for more details regarding what they are doing, please see below.
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Tue 7/28/2009 5:39 PM
General Announcement: Dear Valued Customer,
Subject: Emergency maintenance notification for Saturday, August 1st 2009 for
Date: Saturday, August 1st, 2009
Start time: 08:00 US Eastern
Estimated end time: 22:00 US Eastern
Services: All clients at Northern Virginia Data Center 2 (VA2)
Type of work: Network Switch Replacement
Purpose of work: After action to July 13th network event.
Impact of work:
On Monday, July 13th, 2009, we experienced a data center-wide outage as a result of a failing network switch. Through a coordinated effort with our vendor, we determined that a full switch replacement is the best course of action to increase reliability and stability at our Northern Virginia Data Center 2 (VA2). As this device is a part of our core network infrastructure, we require an extended emergency maintenance window to perform the hardware replacement.
This emergency maintenance is planned for Saturday, August 1st 2009, and the work will start at 08:00 hrs US Eastern and is expected to continue until 22:00 hrs US Eastern. As a precaution, we advise that you inform your faculty and students to expect intermittent service interruptions during this maintenance window. We will take every precaution to keep the work seamless and maintain system availability.
We understand that this is short notice and unfortunately we must perform this maintenance.
