News
Staff E-mail Slowness
Wednesday 23rd April 2008
As you are probably aware, we have been experiencing performance issues with the new staff e-mail system. We realise how severely this can disrupt the work of many staff, and we apologise for the inconvenience caused and time wasted.
We are dealing with the situation as follows:
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In the short term, we are re-organising the structure of the disk storage underpinning staff e-mail; this has already alleviated slow performance (as of Wednesday morning); this work will be completed early next week, and the service should be considered at risk until noon on Tuesday 29 April.
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In the medium term, we are suspending the rollout of the new staff e-mail system, and calling for a quick external review of that system; as well as server and storage performance issues, this will look at the experience of PC and Mac users at the client end, and the ongoing level of staff resource needed to support the service.
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Our longer term strategy for staff e-mail will be shaped by this review.
Please be assured that IT Services colleagues have worked hard around the clock for the last few days to address the performance problems, and are pleased to have found a way forward that has alleviated the most pressing problems.
Once again we apologise for the inconvenience and disruption caused to users; please be assured that the staff e-mail service is the top priority within IT Services at this time.
Regards,
Dr Phil Richards, Director of IT
Professor Cliff McKnight, Chair of E-mail Advisory Group
Nick Cope, Faculty IT Co-ordinator – Engineering
Dr Steven Kenny, Faculty IT Co-ordinator – Science
Philip Wilkinson-Blake, Faculty IT Co-ordinator – SSH
Monday 21st April 2008
Staff have experienced problems with the 'new' staff e-mail system this morning, where the system has been slow and users may have been unable to log in.
The problems have been caused by the configuration of the underlying storage system. We are working to change this configuration, and subsequently improve the performance of the whole system. The problem is particularly noticeable between 9:00 and 10:30 on Monday mornings (the time of highest load), and we expect to have improved the situation for next Monday.
Our apologies for the inconvenience,
IT Services.