Allison Farole
Staff Writer

The heat of the summer caused major problems for the University of La Verne’s campus servers maintained by the Office of Information Technology. With temperatures reaching more than 100 degrees on several days this summer, air conditioning units in the two data centers shut down causing the servers to reach more than 78 degrees.

Servers work properly when stored in temperatures of 50 to 70 degrees.

“This has been going on for over a year. This is the second summer with this problem,” Clive Houston-Brown, chief information officer said.

The number of servers has grown to 81 units and the storage facilities of these servers have proven to not be properly equipped.

Currently the data centers are in standard rooms located in Founders Hall and Woody Hall. These rooms have standard air conditioning and if one air conditioner out of the three or four that are located in the room goes down then the temperature rises.

“Every 18 degrees above 70 degrees [the servers endure] the shelf life is reduced by 50 percent,” Houston-Brown said.

Over the past two summers the ULV has been lucky enough to catch the problem in time. At one point during the summer, OIT found servers reaching 98 degrees at 2 a.m.

If a server fails the accessibility to registration, financial aid and payroll can be lost. Internet access could also be affected greatly. However, data will not be lost since everything is backed up.

“We have now transitioned from paper to [online], we need to make sure we support and maintain all of our systems so that it is up and running on a daily basis,” said Marilyn Davies, registrar.

To solve the problem, OIT is working closely with Hewlett Packard and ULV maintenance to keep an eye on the servers.

“We can squeak by during the cooler months but we need to absolutely have a solution by early summer,” said Mancin Taylor, director of infrastructure support.

Currently the facilities in Founders Hall 207 A, B and C share an air conditioner with the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine in the biology department, along with the current air conditioners in the centers.

By the end of the year and early 2007, two 4-ton air conditioning units should be installed to back up the data centers in Founders Hall.

“We’ve grown so fast in technology it is a work in progress,” Davies said. “[OIT] doesn’t have a lot of staff to do that [maintenance] but we have come a long ways. We should be proud of ourselves to provide a better service to our students.”

Allison Farole can be reached at allison.farole@yahoo.com.