While University e-mail users with first names beginning with A, B, C, D, E, F and G expected downtime Saturday, most were not prepared for unscheduled inaccessibility on Monday, stemming from a hardware failure.
In an e-mail sent out to affected students early Monday morning, Information Technology and Communication officials explained that any e-mails received by these accounts between the hours of around 6:30 p.m. Sunday and 12:35 p.m. Monday were lost.
"The server experienced a catastrophic hardware failure in the RAID controller," ITC Help Desk Manager George Payne said. "Unfortunately, there's no way to really anticipate a failure like this."
The Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) controller manages a number of hard drives, which in this case store e-mail messages. It allows hard drives to be swapped in and out without loss of data.
As the RAID controller failed, however, it prevented incoming messages from being saved to the hard drives. Messages sent to affected users were lost.
The hardware failure was not a result of the weekend server move, Payne said. As of now, the other servers will be upgraded as scheduled.
"On Monday afternoon, we realized what had happened and tried to bring [the server] back up," Payne said. "We eventually realized it was shot and had to reload everything from saved tapes."
Periodically, ITC saves data from the disks onto tapes. A backup last occurred 6:28 p.m. Sunday.
Payne expressed concern over the issue.
"It's getting near the time when people are sending out resumes to companies," he said. "I'd hate for a student to spend four years here and miss out on a great job because an employer sent an e-mail out during that 18-hour period."
Although users cannot retrieve e-mails received during that period, a log of who sent messages out still is saved. ITC plans to send these logs to everyone affected so users can determine whether to contact some of the senders and request they send the message again.
Students voiced mixed reactions over the incident.
"It was very frustrating not being able to access my e-mail," third-year College student Andrew Hayes said. "I had some important correspondence to send out."
But others were not as upset.
"I didn't really care since all I get are mass mailings," third-year College student Aaron Kremer said. "It's actually probably better my messages are gone"
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