Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Update On Your Email: Monday Juanuary 23, 2012

Greetings All,

It is my pleasure to address you all by email today. I know many of you used printers, fax machines and telephones for the first time in a while to complete your University business.

First thank you for your patience and assistance as we have work together to communicate during the outage. After a hardware failure, we had to restore the exchange system from backup according to our disaster recovery plan. Staff and faculty email was the only system effected. Student email, Banner, Blackboard, Internet…all other systems were available. The recovery was successful. Anyone who sent email to the University during the outage received notification that their emails were being held for delivery, and they received requests to resend to you to ensure delivery.

Details and timelines are below.

What happened:
On Tuesday, January 17th just before 6am, the exchange system, which is comprised of two servers (two post offices that receive and sort the mail) and a very large network storage drive (all of the individual mailboxes that we each see every day) went offline. As the servers were writing (post office was sending) data to the storage drive (our mail boxes) the storage drive had a hardware failure. This failure cause a corruption of the databases that make up our mailboxes.

The ITS staff and Exchange engineer who set up the system for us, were able to replace the hardware that failed once the problem was identified. We keep spare parts for just such an occasion. However, the databases had to 1) recovered from back up that was taken at 1am on Tuesday; 2) re-indexed so they could be accessed; and 3) remounted to the servers. The recovery from back up took about seven hours, we store a very large amount of email. But the backup was successful because of the disaster recovery planning that was done.

The next step of re-indexing the databases took the most time. The databases that comprise much of the STX mailboxes were the first online. These became to users at about 4pm on Wednesday. This was not all of the users on STX, it was all of the users on the server called STX. These folks starting receiving their email and received the stored backlog of email.

The second server contained considerably more data, and the re-indexing did not finish until 7pm on Sunday night. This was the necessary process of touching every email that we saved – a direct correlation to the size of our mailboxes.

The staff and faculty on the second server received access to their email at approximately 8:30 last night. The email that was being held in queue was delivered to email boxes. There were emails that were bounced to senders so that they could resend.

MAIL SENT TO UVI DURING OUTAGE: When mail was received that could not be delivered, senders received updates each day on whether their email was delivered to you. On day one, they were told there was a delay not to resend. On day two, the sender was told there was a further delay, not to resend. For mail over 72 hours old, senders were asked to resend. Regardless of when the email was sent to you, it will have a date and time when it was delivered to you – not sent to you. So there will be a gap in your email box, and there may be email that senders did not resend to you.

WHAT IS NEXT:
The exchange server hardware and storage server is currently at end of life. This fall planning had already started to move UVI to a new system because of aging server hardware, lack of capacity to accommodate mailbox size, and unmet annual costs. This plan was presented to the UVI senate and cabinet already. We will be accelerating that plan to move UVI mail to the CLOUD. You will be hearing more about that in the very near future. We would expect to move all users to the new system within 90 days. But we cannot move you if you have a very large mail box. So please continue to reduce your email box size. The helpdesk can assist you.

Please let me know if you have additional questions, or if you are having difficulties.
Thank you again.

Tina

ATTENTION EXCHANGE USERS! PLEASE ARCHIVE OR DELETE ALL OLD EMAILS

Office of the CIO
January 5, 2012


TECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Archive or Delete all old emails!



Happy New Year to All:

We need all users to archive or delete all old email, this action is necessary to free up much needed storage space on our exchange server. Please follow the directions below to quickly clean your mail box. Thanks so much for attending to this as soon as possible.


Here’s how to quickly clean your Inbox in Outlook 2003/2007
If you receive a lot of emails every day your inbox can fill up quickly. Outlook 2003 has an easy way to clean up your inbox quickly without having to go through each email individually to decide what needs to be kept.
To get to this window, click on Tools \ Mailbox Cleanup.

In this window you have several options to choose from. The easiest option is to select AutoArchive, which will move older items into the Archive Folder. You could also choose to empty the deleted items.
One of the more useful features however, is to quickly find all large emails using the “Find items larger than” button. Deleting all the largest emails would very quickly bring your inbox size down to a reasonable size.

Here’s how to configure AutoArchive in Outlook 2007
The AutoArchive feature can be used in order to control what email is kept on the server’s storage and what can be saved to your local hard drive or preferably an external drive. AutoArchive is turned on by default in Outlook 2007 and will actually remove some of the oldest files (you determine the amount of time).
Open Outlook and click on Tools \ Options

Now click on the other tab and click the AutoArchive button.

This opens up a whole menu of options and settings to pick from: for instance you can choose how often AutoArchive runs for example it can run every 20 days. A check should be placed next to “Prompt before AutoArchive runs” so users can confirm the AutoArchive run.

This is also where you decide when to clean out old items. You can select the Browse button to indicate where you want to move them to, your local hard drive or an external drive. You can always select to permanently delete old items if you do not want to keep them around any longer. Click OK to save your settings.