Balancing act: ITS modernizes voice-mail, e-mail

In the world of telephone service, companies talk about the "five nines": an average telephone is available 99.999 percent of the time—out of service for no more than six minutes in an entire year. The two-hour e-mail outage on Yale campus on the morning of Thurs., Oct. 19, however, showed that the same is not true of email. So while University phones will be unavailable for no more than a few minutes this December when Information Techonolgy Services (ITS) upgrades the campus telecommunications system, Central E-mail, with little warning, shut down this week to fix problems that were identified weeks ago. In terms of reliability, the difference between students' two most precious forms of communication is—for now—stark.

COURTESY These flashing dots are the warnings from the e-mail servers on Yale's network status page, visible for over two hours in the early hours of Thurs., Oct. 19.

Especially in recent weeks, delays and denied access have increased frustrations with e-mail. "Performance of the Pantheon Central E-mail servers has been erratic for the past three weeks," Manager of E-mail and Network Services Lynna Jackson, admitted. She explained that the quality of service varies with time of day, which e-mail client is used—Pine, Eudora, Netscape, Webmail—and how large an inbox is. "Many possible causes have been discussed, researched and ruled out," she said. Contrary to initial suspicions of web-based e-mail, the culprit turned out to be uneven sharing of the burden between the multiple hard drives on the e-mail servers. Because of the system's complexity, she added, reconfiguring the disk drives has taken some time.

This is not the first time that Yale has experienced such problems. On Sat., Feb. 18, the system stopped functioning for several hours. That came on the heels of slowdowns and intermittent outages, which ITS explained were a result of several months worth of delays in acquiring new machines for the Pantheon. Director of ITS Daniel Updegrove explained at the time, "We're always being asked to justify our budget requests and constantly talking about where do we need new hardware, where do we need new software, where do we need new people." [YH 2/25/00]

Shortly thereafter, a separate division within ITS was created for managing e-mail, and this semester marked the introduction of web-based e-mail. But amidst these changes—and growth in the number of users to 17,000—problems appeared in the four post office machines that form the core of the e-mail service.

The Yale Administration's phone system, on the other hand, has been working smoothly. Even their plans to switch student phones to a new dialing prefix this summer—leaving both 432 and 436 for the Administration—should go off without a hitch. "The goal of the project is to have as few visible or operational effects as possible," Associate Director of Telecommunications John Meickle said.

Student phone service will remain constant over the next year precisely because ITS has grander plans for students but is waiting for the technology to mature. One possible avenue for the expansion of student phone service is providing cellular phone service through an on-campus network, instead of having students dialing outside of Yale to reach a destination that might be down the street.

ITS, historically, has been careful about adopting new technologies. Meickle explained that Yale is waiting for products using new technology to become more reliable—as well as reach commodity status and reasonable pricing. "The goal is always to get as much use as possible out of the equipment that the University purchases and not wind up with useless, legacy equipment," he said.

In fact, the new administrative phone system allows for seamless and cost-effective upgrades to newer technologies and features. "We have been briefed by Northern [Telecom] on their future plans and anticipate that this system will help the University transition to future Internet Protocol (IP) and wireless services," Meickle said.

One of the inherent capacities of IP-based systems is integration with regular phones, cellular phones, e-mail and instant messaging into something known as unified messaging, being investigated for Yale's next voice mail system. The trend seems to be away from increased voice communications, Meickle noted. "We have seen erosion of student toll traffic as they use alternative services," he said. "We believe that the widespread use of e-mail, chat, the web, cell phones, and instant messaging is causing the stabilization of wired voice traffic. Overall, people are spending much more time communicating but are doing it with a greater and more appropriate variety of tool and technologies."

This makes the e-mail system that much more critical, reaching importance—and an expectation of reliability—akin to the phone's. "ITS is keenly aware of the importance of e-mail at the University today," Jackson confessed. "Systems are carefully monitored 24 hours a day and every effort is made to resolve problems as quickly as possible."

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