Tue 17 Apr 2007
Monday night around 10:30pm, a problem with the memory on the database server was encountered. This caused all Blackboard connections to the database to close, rendering Blackboard unavailable at this time. A restart of the database was required, and Blackboard was restored to full operation by 12 midnight.
The exact nature of the problem is still not known, and we are actively working with Oracle to determine what went wrong and ensure it does not happen again.
Fri 13 Apr 2007
myUSF, USF’s customized implementation of the Blackboard Academic Suite, is to be upgraded to the latest version of Blackboard, 7.2. This software provides new features, as well as additional important performance enhancements that have been made to the system.
- New Features -
Release Notes and Details on New Features [pdf]
—Summer Semester Course Sites Availability—
All C07 course sites are currently available in myUSF. Instructor assignments —as specified in OASIS/Banner— for the upcoming semester have already begun. Any content added to the C07 course sites prior to the beginning of the upgrade window will be migrated with the upgrade.
Student enrollment for the summer term begins after final exams, on Saturday, May 5th.
Update Sat 2:56pm The update is complete.
Fri 6 Apr 2007
Last night while all but 30 of you were sleeping, I snuck in during the scheduled Blackboard maintenance period and installed new a database server.
The old server was a Sun V880, which had 8 1.0Ghz UltraSparc3 processors and 32Gb Memory. This worthy workhorse of a database served us well for 3 years, having never experienced and unplanned downtime due to hardware failure. For those who appreciate such things, at one point the server had an uptime of just over 400 days, and was only rebooted to install a critical security patch.
It’s replacement is a shiny new Sun T2000, configured with a single 8-core Niagara CPU running at 1.2Ghz, along with 16Gb RAM. I estimate a 20% increase in performance of the T2000 over it’s predecessor. If 20% seems a bit low for a server almost 4 years newer than what it’s replacing, it is. Buying these machines do have very tangible benefits.
1) T2000s use about an eigth the power of the V880 and about an eigth of the rack space in teh server room. They’ve basically shrunk the processing power of the V880 into a box not much bigger than your home DVD player.
2) T2000s cost 80% less than what we paid for the V880.
3) T2000s are really good at scaling vertically. With Oracle RAC, we can cluster 2 or more T2000s together and double, triple, or more the processing power available to the Blackboard database. And we can grow this processing power for much less money than buying a single large server.
I’m very optimistic the small performance gain we acquired last night will help smooth the performance bumps sure to be experienced during the final weeks of classes. It won’t completely eliminate the problem, but the elbow at which point Blackboard becomes useless should shift a little more to the right.
