[Staff] Need to reschedule upcomming power outage

[Christopher Paolini]

Hi Al,

Scheduling a campus-wide power outage two days before Christmas Eve, and
a restoration on Christmas Eve, is a terrible idea.  We need to
reschedule this outage so it occurs during normal working days so
university IT staff can physically be on campus to shutdown, and bring
back online, critical computer and network infrastructure.

Many research active faculty and graduate students need to remotely
access servers and computing clusters during the winter break for
running numerical simulations (e.g. computational fluid dynamics
simulations, structural analysis computations, geochemical and
geoemechanics simulations, electromagnetic simulations, electronic
structure modeling, etc.).

Many IT staff personnel who manage university network and computational
resources will leave the San Diego region for Christmas vacation several
days before Dec. 22, primarily to use accrued vacation time that will
expire if not used by Dec. 31.  Almost all university personnel will be
with their families and/or on vacation the day of Christmas Eve
(Saturday, December 24).

If you shutdown power on the 22nd, IT staff will need to shutdown
computing infrastructure many days earlier, before they leave on
vacation.  Asking staff members to come to campus on Christmas Day to
bring computing infrastructure back online is unreasonable.  The
consequence of scheduling an outage December 22-24 is that critical
computing infrastructure will remain offline and remotely inaccessible
until IT personnel return from vacation, typically on January 3. This
will result in an effective two-week loss of remote computational
infrastructure usage by faculty and students, and may have a significant
impact on research.

In addition to impacting university computational infrastructure, many
faculty who operate wet laboratories have 24/7 refrigeration
requirements.  Fume hoods containing hazardous or volatile materials
require constant power to drive fans in the hood exhaust system.

The power outage and restoration should be rescheduled to occur during
normal working times, to allow IT staff to shutdown and bring equipment
back online before leaving on vacation.

Thank you,

Chris, 

---
Christopher Paolini, PhD
College of Engineering IT Manager
San Diego State University
paolini at engineering.sdsu.edu
http://paolini.sdsu.edu/