What: Computing Center electrical shutdown of all networking, email, central applications like Banner, Blackboard, Oracle, and campus web pages (except for a notification message), affecting all campus buildings including ITC and UDC.

When: Two and a Half Hours: on Friday, April 3rd from 6:30 pm – 9 pm.

Why: To make a necessary change to the emergency power generation system for the campus Data Center.

Although a temporary emergency power generation system was installed in the Data Center last year, this is the first of three additional necessary changes to make the generator and existing uninterruptible power supply (UPS) fully operational. Preliminary work that must be done preceding the power outage will begin at 3 pm, and culminate in the outage from 6:30-9 pm. All services should be restored beginning at 9 pm.

There is no good time to shut down so many critical services, and the windows available to do so are few. Someone is always using some aspect of our technical environment, and those activities will be interrupted by the shutdown. We have chosen this time because it’s at the beginning of spring break and other activities are expected to be at a low ebb on a Friday night.

While the outages are a burden for the University community, we are all at the mercy of unexpected power interruptions until the work is completed.

The work culminates in a shut down of power to the Data Center at 6:30 pm. For the two and a half hours scheduled, the campus network, email and central servers including the main campus web server will be down and unavailable. People in offices and residence halls, including the ITC and UDC, will be able to use their PC’s or local classroom equipment during that time, but will have no working network connections. To ensure that people from off-campus (i.e. on the internet) will still be able to “find” the University on the web, we will reflect web traffic for binghamton.edu to our off-site location at BCC to tell people we are down.

We ask your forbearance on this change, and others that will be similarly scheduled in the future.