College Tech Leaders Keep Their Campuses Connected, Even in Blizzards

There are no snow days for e-mail.

At campuses where heavy snowfall is routine, college tech leaders have taken steps to ensure that their networks continue to run smoothly even in extreme weather conditions.

Joshua Riedy, chief information officer at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, says the blizzards that have closed numerous colleges would barely register on his campus. “We wouldn’t even miss school,” he says.

Postwinter floods are of far greater concern for Mr. Riedy. A severe flood in 1997 forced the university to transport its network servers by semitrailers to secure locations in Bismarck and Fargo, N.D.

The city has since built flood walls that so far have prevented a recurrence of those conditions, but the university has plans, pending legislative approval, to build a secure data center that Mr. Riedy hopes will withstand the worst conditions. The data center is slated to be built at the confluence of two different power grids, with two backup generators in case both grids go down.

Perry M. Sisk, director of information technology systems and support at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, says that he deals with regular weather-related power outages and that the campus feels the effects of two to three hurricanes in a typical year.

His campus began to take protection of its servers far more seriously after it was hit directly by Hurricane Juan in September 2003. The storm knocked out the campus network for eight or nine days. The network came back online the day before payroll was due. “That was a learning experience for a lot of people,” he says.

In addition to installing a major backup generator after that hurricane, college leaders have put in two separate network connections on different parts of campus that are on different power grids. They’re planning to put a network core—a central point through which network connections are routed—in each location, so the network can remain up even if one site loses power.

In a post to the CIO listserv for Educause, a nonprofit higher-education technology group, Mr. Sisk suggested that colleges could established backup sites far away from their primary location to minimize weather risk, but he says his campus hasn’t done so yet.

Even the best preparations can accomplish only so much, he says. His campus did not lose power during a recent storm, but when a nearby institution on the same network did, the Saint Mary’s network went down with it.

“When you’re looking at network survivability of an event, you have to look at every point between campus and the outside world,” he says.