Can the Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Run an Information-Age Infrastructure System
Or should Berkeley be outsourcing it?
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Shelton Waggener, Associate VC - IST and Chief Information Officer (Campuswide)
I very much appreciate that it is unacceptable to have a core campus system like CalMail offline for any length of time. Today`s continued problems with CalMail have been particularly difficult for all involved. We work hard to design and operate systems that can handle the needs of our community and when we fail to meet that standard we bring in outside experts to help us improve. We have added additional outside experts from other campuses, vendors and new team members from the Berkeley technical community as we work through this crisis. This is our highest priority and will remain so until we have the environment fully stabilized. The following message provides current information. You can also check http://systemstatus.berkeley.edu for the latest status.
Regards,
Shel Waggener
Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO
CalMail Performance Issues
Outage Type: UNSCHEDULED OUTAGE
Date Submitted: Monday, November 28, 2011 – Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Outage Start/End Time: 1145 – TBD
Groups Impacted: CalMail
Equipment: calmail.berkeley.eduDescription: UPDATE – Tuesday, November 29, 4:00PM: The web clients are currently available, but expect brief periods of unavailabilty due to heavy load.
As a way to help mitigate the load on the system until the new storage arrives, the decision has been made to only allow access to accounts via the web clients. Desktop email clients, as well as smartphones using their native email clients, will not be able to access CalMail.
Please go to the CalMail Home Page and use one of the web clients to access your account. Web and NotifyLink will be unaffected. This is only temporary, once the storage is in place, we will reopen access.
Tuesday, November 29, 2:00PM: Students interested in forwarding, please click here, you can set forwarding now.
Tuesday, November 29, 1:00pm: CalMail is down. The current problems are related to extremely heavy load combined with little available capacity on the current storage system. The result is constant timeout errors which ultimately add to the load problem. While Faculty and Staff mail must reside on a university email platform, when CalMail returns to service later this afternoon, we are recommending students who have external email addresses forward their CalMail accounts by going to the CalMail Home Page, click on Manage Your Account and login. You will see a link for Forwarding. Removing some of the student email and login volume will help reduce load and allow the CalMail system to catch up to its current backlog.
Tuesday, November 29, 10:30AM: CalMail is currently experiencing severe issues. Users cannot send or receive mail at this time. The IST calmail team is working on the issues and will update the page as information become available.
Tuesday, November 29, 7:00 AM: The IST Service Center has received reports that users are unable to access email using the web clients. The IST calmail team are investigating the problem.
Several backend servers are being throttled to avoid larger scale outages. Until the storage is completely replaced, staff will be managing server loads and expect there will be brief login and delayed delivery issues.
If you receive a login error, please retry later. If you are unsure of the status of Calmail, please check http://systemstatus.berkeley.edu/. There is an exceptionally high load at this time due to outage over the weekend.
