Problems found in computer system

Robert Henry Becker Arizona Daily Wildcat Connie Lang, a customer service supervisor in the Bursar's office, stands in the middle of students who attempt to drop/add classes and find out about financial aid. She then announces that the computer system that controls the Student Information System and the Financial information relating to students will be shut down for 15 minutes at 1 p.m. The system remained down for about three minutes as CCIT corrected a memory allocation problem.

Connie Lang, a customer service supervisor with the Bursars Office, told lines of students that the system would be shut down for 15 minutes starting at 1 p.m. "There will be a short delay," she told them, although she was unable to explain the nature of the problem.

The shut down at 1 p.m. did happen, but SIS was only down for 2 minutes, said Viji Muralidharan, computing manager of systems programming at CCIT. The system was down three times yesterday for a total of 11 minutes.

"It was under-allocated memory. We have the memory available but it was not partitioned right," said Muralidharan.

SIS was not operating from 11:50 a.m. to 11:58 a.m., 12:03 p.m. to 12:04 p.m. and was intentionally shut down by CCIT at 12:59 p.m. and brought back on-line at 1:01 p.m. Since the system was reset yesterday, no further problems have been reported, said system coordinator Jean Fishback.

The system handles all administrative functions like drop adds, degree checks and fee payment but not e-mail accounts, she said.

There are many backups in place with the new system which mirrors all data so it is not permanently lost, and an uninterrupted power supply to prevent power loss during outages.

The new system, an IBM 9672 mainframe, replaced the old system in early May, Fishback said. The hardware was installed in November of 1996, but the most time-consuming process was software transfer, which left the system down May 7, 8 and 9 last year, said computing manager Linda Drew.

Although the newer system has a larger memory, 120 gigabytes, and is only about one-sixth the size of the old system there are still bugs to be worked out, Muralidharan said.

One of the glitches was exposed yesterday when the new mainframe was flooded with data from all over campus during the first day of classes.

Fishback said before noon yesterday there were 118,000 transactions on the system - the amount normally handled in a day.

Serious problems could arise if a disaster were to knock out the new system, since the mainframe ties into all administrative functions including financial aid records.

The center is currently working on a "business recovery" program, which would allow one system to take over the functions of another in the event of a disaster, Fishback said. Currently, no such system is in place.

The new system does not mean students who log onto UAInfo will have a shorter wait, Drew said. What determines the speed of a PC connection is the line you dial in on.