IT Services Working Around the Clock to Resolve Storage Problem

Over the weekend, IT Services performed emergency maintenance in an effort to resolve an ongoing storage infrastructure problem that has caused brief, intermittent outages for services such as MyDocs, SharePoint, Exchange, Gizmo, emPower, Newswire, OmniUpdate and wireless authentication.

Last November, new Dell flash storage was deployed in a move to optimize technology resources within the server virtualization environment. Over time, there has been an ongoing issue with unexpected interruptions in communication between VM hosts and the storage infrastructure resulting in unexpected outages that have typically lasted for less than two hours. Outages due to planned maintenance have been slightly longer.

The root cause has not yet been determined, but new network equipment related to the storage infrastructure was installed over the holiday weekend. IT Services technical personnel are working on-site around the clock with storage, network and virtualization equipment vendors to find a solution. In addition, critical systems are being temporarily relocated in an attempt to limit the impact of future outages.

As IT Services continues to investigate, brief outages could occur. Users can report problems at askit.uark.edu or by calling the Help Desk at 479-575-2905.

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Planned outages are posted at itstatus.uark.edu/calendar. Get outage notifications and updates from IT Services at twitter.com/uaits, facebook.com/uarkITS or its.uark.edu/news.