While undergoing an upgrade Tuesday, the MyMail service was unavailable from 6 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. – four and a half hours longer than expected.

Information and Technology Services planned to take MyMail offline from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. to add more memory to the server. But the process didn’t run as smoothly as they hoped, said Chris Sedore, SU’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

‘We’re not happy about the outage,’ Sedore said. ‘This kind of outage is not acceptable. This is not the way we like to run our system. Outages of any kind aren’t acceptable.’

The memory upgrade is a two-step process, he explained. First, ITS loads new memory into the system. Next, the technicians program the system to recognize the additional space and distribute it to users. But the second part took longer than usual Tuesday.

ITS is still investigating why the second half of the operation stalled, Sedore said. Programmers haven’t reached a definite conclusion.

‘This is the type of process where you can’t stop,’ he said. ‘Once you start, you’ve got to wait ’til it finishes.’

This is the first memory upgrade to MyMail since the 2007-2008 school year. The memory should last MyMail the rest of the semester.

A new e-mail system with more data space and better mobile technology will be introduced as early as next year. It is in the pilot phase right now, Sedore said.

More details on the new e-mail program, which is called ‘SUmail,’ will follow in early April.

adbrow03@syr.edu

Published on March 31, 2009 at 12:00 pm