At 18.00 on 1 November, IT Services will be performing a hardware upgrade to the Blackboard system.

Blackboard is the University VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and provides collaboration and learning tools to staff and students alike.

Recently we have been experiencing intermittent problems with this system and as part of our work to remedy this we are upgrading the hardware. The work involves replacing the existing iSCSI  storage access protocol with dual fibre channel connections on the database server and a similar upgrade on the connection to the application server.

By using fibre channel we will get both improved performance and resilience. This work follows additional upgrade to the memory of the application server that has already reduced the amount of unscheduled downtime we were experiencing.

Should you continue to have problems with the system after the upgrade, please contact its-help@reading.ac.uk

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