July 9 service disruption traced to storage problem

Various campus services, including email, were disrupted for some users for part of Wednesday, July 9, by a problem involving a background data storage service.

The disruptions began at 12 p.m. and were mostly resolved by 2:30 p.m.

The problem was "an unresponsive storage group on the SAN [storage area network] that caused some Private Cloud Service hosts to become unavailable," according to the update posted at status.ucdavis.edu Wednesday afternoon.

In other words, some campus services couldn't access stored data they need in order to function. The data is kept on virtual servers (part of the campus's Private Cloud Service), a common and efficient method for storing more data using fewer physical server machines.

However, many services are supported by the Private Cloud Service, and not all servers were affected by the storage problem.

The disruption Wednesday extended to the Central Authentication Service (CAS), which affected access to MyUCDavis; Geckomail; DavisMail; SISWeb; MyAdmissions; SmartSite; the Sympa mailing list management and archives; the Time Reporting System; and federated applications, such as the UC Learning Center (U-Learn). Additionally, some users were unable to access e-mail services within uConnect, the email and collaboration service also known as uConnect Local or uConnect on-premise.

Information and Educational Technology posted several service updates to status.ucdavis.edu during and after the disruptions. Strategic Communications posted a notice on the campus home page, www.ucdavis.edu.

A version of the problem resurfaced about 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, but did not affect campus services. All signs of the problem were gone by 10 p.m., and did not return on Thursday.

IET is working with the storage product vendor to investigate the pr oblem thoroughly and prevent it from happening again.

The current status of campus services is always posted at status.ucdavis.edu. If you have questions about how an outage affects you, please contact your department's technological staff or call the IT Express Service Desk at 530-754-HELP (4357).