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To MSU NAG members: I'm posting this on behalf of Tom Davis, Interim Director, MSU Computer Laboratory. _________________________________________ About Recent mail.msu.edu Service Outages On Thursday May 15 at approximately 6:30 p.m., mail.msu.edu, MSU’s new central e-mail system, went down. Computer Laboratory Operations detected the outage and contacted the mail.msu.edu project team, which began work on the problem immediately. The outage lasted until 2:30 a.m. on Friday. The outage follows three other similar unexpected outages. The Computer Laboratory has identified an intermittent hardware problem with the two storage arrays used by the mail.msu.edu system. Because all of the previous outages were on one of the two arrays, it appeared as if only that storage subsystem was affected. Unfortunately, the most recent failure occurred on the other, previously-unaffected array. We continue to work with the vendor to identify the failing components and have them replaced. Some customers have asked us why these outages last for an extended period of time. The storage arrays (configured as RAID 5) are designed to detect faults and recover in a fraction of the time we are experiencing. We are also working with the vendor on this problem. We again apologize for these unexpected outages. We do understand that outages of the new mail system cause disruption to students, faculty and staff. The mail team continues to work diligently to resolve the outages and to prevent future ones. If you have any questions please contact Computer Laboratory consultants at 432-6200 or [log in to unmask] Sincerely, Tom Davis Interim Director, MSU Computer Laboratory