Important information: Planned maintenance and IT service disruption

ITMS will be undertaking a major refresh of the university network, firewall, and data centres.

While delivering this work there will be planned interruptions to all IT services.

This will include WiFi, PC and internet access, as well as the telephone network. Online services will also be affected during the downtime including DMUHub, Blackboard, and certain MyDMU functionality.

The Library will remain open but reservations, self-service machines, printing, and lending systems will be affected.

As this will impact our teaching and business operations we have scheduled this work to take place outside of normal operating hours.

The outage will take place from 7am to midday on Saturday 27 April 2019

We anticipate further outages in May and June and Information Technology and Media Services (ITMS) will confirm the details well in advance of the work taking place.

Although we work hard at minimising the impact on our students, it is not always possible to complete this essential work without interruptions and we would like to apologise in advance for this disruption.

Thanks in advance for your understanding and co-operation. 

 

FAQs

Why are we upgrading our infrastructure?

To maintain the reliability and efficiency of our student facing and business support operations we need to periodically refresh our technical infrastructure. The university has invested significant funding to upgrade our core network, firewalls and on-premise server infrastructure.

What benefits will I see?

The focus of these upgrades is to increase the security, durability, and efficiency of our core infrastructure. Through upgrading our network, firewall, and data centres the security of our estate is strengthened, maintenance and service interruptions will be reduced, and the university will have up-to-date platform technologies.

Also by introducing new technology users will see performance improvements as well as having more resilient services. This investment is to future proof our infrastructure so the university can continue to provide excellent service to our students and support growth.

Why are we doing this work now and not during the summer break?

The work is being delivered now (April – June) as during the summer months ITMS is extremely busy in preparing Labs and teaching spaces for the new academic year, refreshing hardware, software, and AV. They are also preparing the systems and technologies for Confirmation and Clearing.