News
 

Enrollment disruptions temporary

First-day demands overloaded system

Cougar News Staff

An overload in the computer system that controls enrollment management services caused brief disruptions of service Tuesday, but University officials said the problems were not long-term.

Ed Apodaca, associate vice president for enrollment management, said the system was offline for about 40 minutes Tuesday morning. The system had to be re-started after heavy demand caused it to "blow a fuse," Apodaca said.

Most students affected by the outage probably noticed it when they attempted to add or drop courses by phone or online. Apodaca said enrollment during the first few days of classes always puts a heavy load on the system.

Some $20 million in financial aid checks printed over the weekend also taxed the system, Apodaca said.

"Itis a case where thereis so much demand put on it at a single time," he said. "Itis obvious we need to keep adding more and more memory."

The systemis newest functions, including online student account access, housing and the AskShasta general information service, make it an essential part of daily campus life. Apodaca said the system had 8.3 million hits last year.

"Itis unbelievable how dependent we are on it," Apodaca said. "In 20 or 30 minutes (offline), you can affect a lot of students."

He said there is no guarantee more outages will not occur during the period of heavy usage at the beginning of the semester, but the University is making plans to increase the systemis capacity.
 

 Send comments to dcnews@mail.uh.edu