As you know from
e-mails sent earlier today, the Blackboard system remained stable overnight.
At about 7:15 a.m., it began to exhibit the same erratic behavior that we
have been monitoring over the last week and eventually became unavailable at
about 8:30 a.m.
The Blackboard
Crisis Response Team, comprising representatives from CIS, Blackboard, Oracle,
SUN, VM Ware, Cisco, and All Stream, has been meeting since early morning and
working to restore the system to a normal state. Under the guidance of
Cisco, Oracle and Sun, we have installed diagnostic tools and equipment to
provide us with additional data and have applied patches provided by Sun
Microsystems. While we do not believe that these efforts alone will keep
the system from crashing again, we must be thorough in our efforts to restore
the system.
A the same time, we
are moving to a “hosted environment,” and I would like to explain more about
what that means. From the users’ point of view, everything will look and
function the same. However from
behind the scenes the Blackboard 8.0 system will no longer run at the CIS data
center. The University would use Blackboard 8.0 software installed on
hardware located at the Blackboard, Inc. data center in Virginia . This
hosted Blackboard 8.0 environment was established by Blackboard to support its
customers, and Blackboard manages and maintains its on a round-the-clock basis.
CIS is also working on an approach for users to log in to the hosted
environment system and modifying our network and Internet connections to handle
the additional traffic. Our goal is to make this cutover as easy and
transparent as possible to all users.
We believe that this
plan will assist our efforts to identify the root cause(s) of these persistent
problems, including whether they stem from within the CIS environment or are
inherent to the Blackboard 8.0 system. If the problems are not resolved
while the system runs at Blackboard’s data center, then our focus will shift to
the Blackboard 8.0 system and we will ensure that the company corrects these
problems. Should the problems turn out to reside at CIS, we will use the
time while running in a hosted environment to track the root cause(s) and
correct them.
The move to a hosted
environment requires several steps, including but not limited to the following:
While CIS is already
working on many of these items, we cannot yet establish a firm completion time.
However, we do know that several days of work are required. We will
have a better sense of the timeline as progress is made on the data transfer and
work on these many issues progresses.
We will continue to update the user community.
During this time,
the Blackboard Crisis Response Team will attempt to restore service and keep the
system at CIS operating. Users should be advised that the system will be
available sporadically until we can move to the hosted environment. We
therefore strongly recommend that users save their data frequently in order to
avoid potential data loss.
Thank you.
Brian Cohen
Associate Vice Chancellor and University CIO
City
University of New York
Brian.Cohen@mail.cuny.edu
(212) 541-0365