Reminder - EWU eLearning Systems Maintenance Schedule

All - just a reminder, as we start a new school year, that during the upcoming year there are planned times for both scheduled maintenance and scheduled downtimes for both Blackboard and the RealNetworks Helix streaming media server.

The Blackboard service is the sum of 10 different computers working together (application servers, database servers, load balancers, etc.). For the most part we are able to tune and update the Blackboard service without impacting service.

Here is the Blackboard schedule for maintenance and downtime. Note: The RealNetworks 

Helix streaming media server follows the same maintenance and downtime schedule as adopted for Blackboard.

Scheduled Maintenance We work on the Blackboard servers on the First, Third, and Fifth Thursday afternoon of each month. We perform scheduled maintenance which typically will not cause a service interruption. However, of any time period during the week, these periods of scheduled maintenance are most likely to exhibit service disruptions or intermittent response time.

Scheduled Downtime The first Thursday of each quarterly academic break is reserved for scheduled downtime. Plan for the Blackboard service to be unavailable from 5:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. on these days. Note that scheduled downtimes follow the quarterly academic schedule (not a semester schedule or extended schedule used by some EWU courses).

Our top priority is to provide a reliable, responsive and secure set of services. In concept we have the option to decide when the Blackboard service will be down or to wait for the service to unexpectedly go down. The servers can pick a date and time to go down or we can proactively pick a date and time to perform maintenance. To prevent unscheduled downtimes, we opt to have regularly scheduled downtimes where necessary maintenance can be performed.

We provide the Blackboard service for the benefit of Eastern's Faculty and Students. As always, we want to hear from you. If a specific scheduled downtime will have a significant negative impact on your instruction please let us know (rescheduling is a possibility but we have limited time windows for necessary scheduled down times).