The Voice

Issue date: 10/20/08 Section: Science & Technology

Media Credit: Chris Asadian Francisco Roque, sits across from a bin of Mountain Dew bottles.

The issues that caused the massive computer crash at the start of the Fall semester shouldn't happen again thanks to several new upgrades to the system by the Information Technology Services Department.

Specifically, it upgraded its data storage architecture to RAID 6. This means that problems like the server crash can fix themselves, according to Francisco Roque, a UNIX administrator on campus.

The end user - you - won't notice much of a difference after these changes.

"Pretty much everything you do on your end will remain the same as a result of these updates," Roque said. "The only thing it means is that once we implement everything, we'll be less likely to have some sort of catastrophic failure.

"All we did was we upgraded software on many different systems so that now we have this new functionality. Now that we have this new functionality, we have to test it out, make sure it works okay, and doesn't cause anything bad."

That will take a few months.

The cost of these upgrades is included in a service package with Sun Microsystems, so there's no added cost to the college.

But these are nowhere near the last upgrades.

"We always need to have more space," Roque said. "As the college grows, the data needed to be stored grows. We're almost always adding more trays of disks. That's an ongoing thing that we need to do.

"We're pretty good now," he continued. "We have all of our critical systems protected, but there's also some more we could do."

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