Vendor apologizes for extended SmartSite outage

The company that hosts SmartSite for UC Davis has apologized for the outage that made the UC Davis course-management system unavailable for 31 hours late last week.

SmartSite was offline from approximately 11:30 a.m. Friday, April 3, until about 7 p.m. Saturday, April 4. No data was lost. SmartSite is now functioning normally.

Akira Takiguchi, chief executive officer of Asahi Net International, described the disruption as "the worst mass outage in the company's history." It affected 40 of ANI's clients, including UC Davis. Key hardware and backup equipment both failed.

"We had some serious operational and equipment issues which resulted in more than half of our customers experiencing an extended period of downtime, while we worked with our vendor to try to troubleshoot and eventually replace the failed hardware," Takiguchi wrote. "[We] are confident the issue has been permanently resolved."

"We will work closely with the storage system vendor to ensure a successful fail-over if one should occur in the future. The system is designed for this, and we are following up to understand why this did not happen," Takiguchi wrote.

Information and Educational Technology, which manages SmartSite for the campus, plans to meet with ANI this week to discuss the outage.

"SmartSite outages impact students and faculty, and this outage is unacceptable," IET administrators wrote in an email they sent to UC Davis faculty, students and staff last Saturday. "This coming week we will meet with [ANI] to debrief, and to discuss steps they will undertake to minimize risk of any recurrence of this kind of outage."

SmartSite also suffered intermittent service interruptions on April 1 and April 2, due at least partly to a load-balancing problem that has been addressed separately.

SmartSite, which uses Sakai operating software, has been UC Davis' main course-management system since 2007. A campus workgroup has been working with faculty and others at UC Davis to evaluate future options for the service. For more information, please contact the workgroup at smartsite-workgroup@ucdavis.edu.