This article provides the final interim summary of activity that has continued to take place since the flooding on 17 July and follows updates given on 20 and 24 July. A full incident report will be published later in the year and will be submitted to the Information Services Committee (ISC).
Despite heavy rainfall over the weekend of 24-26 July there was no further water penetration of the facility at the New Museums Site. A member of our staff visited the room, which is under an active building site, several times over the weekend and found no indication of water leaks.
The UIS networks team has been working extensively with our network equipment vendor to ensure that replacements will meet not only the current need to re-establish resilience but also consider the requirements of a 5-7 year lifecycle. We are grateful of the assistance of the University’s senior management in ensuring that equipment can be purchased as quickly as possible.
At present the University remains connected to the internet via a 10Gbps link, which is half the capacity of our normal connection. We are aware that this may cause constraints for normal term-time use and are working to ensure that our primary 20Gbps link is brought back into service as soon as possible. This may result in a short interruption of service as we switch between the two links but we will do everything possible to ensure minimal disruption and will, of course, provide plenty of notice beforehand.
Following discussions with our network provider (Janet) we can confirm that the University’s second, fully resilient, network connection will be in place before the end of October. We will, of course, bring the connection online as soon as we possibly can. Once operational this second 20Gbps connection will form part of an active pair, giving the University two routes to the Janet network and onward interconnectivity. This change will have an effect on the way that traffic accounting is maintained locally and as a result there will likely be changes in the way that institutional traffic accounting is handled in the future.
Conversations with colleagues in Estates Management have continued, with a hope of locating a suitable above-ground location for our city centre communications equipment.
The UIS incident management team was stood down on Monday 27 July but Steve Riley, Deputy Director for Service Operations, will continue to hold weekly meetings to provide oversight of the various activities still under way across the department.
Previous reports
- Initial incident report / live log (last updated 21 July 2015)
- Interim report on the incident (last updated 20 July 2015)
- Second interim report (last updated 24 July 2015)