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.
April 8th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Sunday afternoon, 3:30pm. Where did Blackboard go? I have tried to get to the BB login page all day (using firefox or IE, no difference) with no luck. All I get is an error page saying that it cannot connect to the server.
April 8th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Brighthouse is experiencing a problem with their network which is
causing packet loss when trying to reach USF hosts for any packet sizes
over 616 bytes. We’ve worked with a couple of folks to verify that
while they can reach on-campus hosts with 616 byte packets, anything
over that will fail.
This is not affecting all of Brighthouse’s users. However, those that
are affected will be unable to reach USF (since most network connections
consist of packets larger than 616 bytes at some point during the
connection).
We have contacted Brighthouse and have sent them the information they
need to locate the problem. However, there is currently no estimated
time for repair.
We will post updates as they become available.
April 9th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I am with Brighthouse and haven’t been able to get on Blackboard all day. Is there any update on when the problem will be fixed?
April 17th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
I cannot log onto oasis through Verizon online. Is this the same issue as the Brighthouse one? I can get on blackboard ok, but when I go to log onto oasis I get the error page about not being able to find the server.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:52 am
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