Network Issues Update

03/03/2016 1:15 PM

We have experienced a number of connectivity issues on campus this year which we know have created a great deal of frustration for our students and employees. Demand on network services is steadily increasing, and there have been multiple related network issues which are often intermittent. Intermittent technical issues are always the most difficult to identify and resolve because of their inconsistent nature.

Our monitoring systems indicated shortly after the start of the spring semester that our bandwidth utilization was very high. We quickly put in an order with one of our Internet service providers for an additional 300Mb of bandwidth, which adequately addressed that issue. We are also testing a content caching appliance that would allow us to serve streaming content, OS updates, and other high demand content from on campus, thus reducing the load on our Internet bandwidth.

However, from a user perspective, network performance has still been inconsistent. At the beginning of the semester we began having load-related problems with the services that manage network addressing. These services interact with other functions of the network, which makes the issues complex to troubleshoot. We have made several changes that should have stabilized the network (and have for periods of time), but have not yet completely alleviated the problems.

We have engaged in a technical support agreement with an external service provider. Their engineers are working with us to review our system setup and load. They will advise us on further steps to take as we continue with utmost urgency to identify and solve the problems we are experiencing. They are confident in their ability to configure the systems to handle the load necessary for our campus and to accommodate future growth.

For more information:

• Frequent updates are posted via our outage twitter feed @BradleyITOutage.
• Information is also available at the bottom of the HelpDesk Web page (helpdesk.bradley.edu) via our outage notification system.
• Updates are also sometimes included in the B-News email service for faculty and staff.

We are continuing to put all of our resources into this issue to find a solution. I know these intermittent outages have caused frustration and that network service has been subpar for our users. Please continue to call the Technology HelpDesk at 309-677-2964, if you have further problems with network services.

Thank you very much.

Sandra H. Bury
Interim Associate Provost
Information Resources and Technology
Bradley University
[email protected]