Eric Schoville and Kathy McCain worked into the wee hours of the morning on July 11 and 12 on the Department of Family Medicine Server Room upgrade. Several goals were accomplished:

• Set up new rack
• Four new rack-mounted servers were installed
• Consolidation of eight servers into three, retiring all eight outdated servers
• Consolidated three old racks into one new rack
• New gigabyte switch installed allowing for faster connections between servers
• Additional hard drive installed for GroupWise restore
• Re-organization of server room.

Why are these important?

• The outdated servers were at least six years old, and were not really true servers but regular computers. Upgrading to true servers gives us more redundancy, interchangeable components to perform a single function in order to cope with failures and errors. New hardware is also faster, giving us quicker response time. Rack mounted servers take up less space as they can be installed vertically. Our server room was getting crowded. We now have one rack instead of three, which frees up a lot of valuable floor space.
  
  
• The old servers were out of warranty, between six months to several years. Keeping current with warranties allows us to have less downtime due to hardware failures. We intend to include all of our servers in a rotation cycle to eliminate out of warranty hardware. The new gigabyte switch should decrease backup time for GroupWise and all of our data files.

As usual, we will inform you ahead of time of any outages that will occur because of hardware upgrades. When possible, we will continue to perform these upgrades during off hours so as not to disrupt normal business hours.