As previously announced, UAA’s e-mail system underwent a major upgrade over the holidays. That upgrade was scheduled to make e-mail unavailable from Monday, December 27 through Sunday, January 2. The upgrade has been completed and the new e-mail system is now fully operational. The following is a brief description and chronology of the upgrade and features of the new system:
New E-mail System Hardware/Software
- Migration from a single-server environment to a six-server enterprise environment;
- New environment includes: anti-spam server (1), client protocol proxy servers (2), mail store servers (2), and outbound e-mail server (1);
- The new hardware environment vastly improves availability and reduces potential downtime;
- Running the latest version of the SunOne messaging system;
Upgrade Events/Chronology
- Setup included provisioning and configuration of six servers all fiber-channel connected for high-speed storage access; separated faculty/staff from student message stores placing each on a separate server; installed and configured load balancing for directory services;
- Migrated 83 GB of individual e-mail message stores to new server environment; migrated 59,812 user accounts to new directory service; migrated 96,298 address book entries to new directory service;
- Work began on Sunday, December 26 during routine maintenance window and completed Thursday, December 30;
- During the week of Jan 3 dependent applications were reconfigured to utilize the new environment.
Feature/function Improvements
- Improved message queue management (better e-mail performance under heavy loads);
- Complete replacement of SMTP messaging engine (better e-mail performance);
- Expanded e-mail filtering rules (improved spam and mail routing management);
- Class of service functionality (ability to create tiers of user priority for message handling);
- Active/inactive account control (a big issue for UAA);
- Improved management of e-mail size and message quotas (another big issue for UAA);
- Redundant and load-balanced LDAP queries (better e-mail performance);
- New HTML presentation and spell checking in Webmail (for Webmail users).
Planning and work associated with this project has been on-going since October. The actual work accomplished since December 26 has taken place around the clock and has involved our Engineering and Network/Systems Operations teams and Sun Messaging consultants from OC4, LLC in Colchester, CT. Their efforts have been significant and are particularly appreciated. We believe you will find the new UAA e-mail system to be a major improvement over our previous system. It represents a major step forward in technology as well as creating a hardware/software environment that meets our needs for a “no downtime, high performance” utility service.
During the balance of January tuning and account maintenance will take place. These activities will continue to improve system performance and remove a sizeable number of inactive e-mail accounts for employees no longer with UAA and students who have not been enrolled for classes for multiple consecutive semesters. Much of this account maintenance has not been practically possible due to the lack of system tools in previous system software. A separate but related upgrade of UAA’s listserve system will also take place in January.
If you notice any problems or anomalies with the new e-mail system please contact the IT Call Center immediately at callcenter@uaa.alaska.edu or call 786-4646 or 877-633-3888. Thanks for your patience during this upgrade.
Rich Whitney
CIO/Associate Vice Chancellor
Universityof Alaska - Anchorage
