The University of New Mexico’s Information Technologies department is preparing for a three-day service outage required to address a critical power maintenance issue at the UNM IT Data Center. The outage, scheduled for Memorial Day weekend May 25-28, will impact a number of services across campus.

Power to the UNM IT building will be shut off during the required maintenance, so services delivered by or through the IT Data Center will be unavailable during this time. These services include, but are not limited to Banner, Loboweb, myUNM, and Learn. Internet connectivity from campus should not be affected.

Data Center Outage

To prepare for the outage, IT needs your help to:

  • Identify any critical (life-safety) services that must not be interrupted;
  • Identify potential risks of service outages Memorial Day weekend;
  • Work with other faculty, staff, students and vendors to make sure service disruptions are well communicated and mitigated, where possible; and
  • Leverage supplemental communication mechanisms to help us keep the campus community involved and well informed.

The critical power maintenance work necessitates a three-day service outage beginning Friday, May 25 at 5 p.m. and concluding Monday, May 28 at 5 p.m.

“The longer we defer this required maintenance the more likely we will endure an unplanned and potentially catastrophic outage,“ stated Duane Arruti, UNM’s Chief Information Officer. “With UNM’s year round cycle of activity there is never a perfect time to perform this maintenance, and we appreciate campus understanding as we endeavor to improve our service reliability.”

UNM IT is currently reviewing options to maintain LoboMail service during the outage and will keep the campus informed of its progress. UNM IT’s highest priority is to ensure that life-safety services are identified and remediated.    

The decision and project planning was determined by Information Technologies Governance Council, which is aimed at maintaining continuity of IT services in the long-run, but requires a temporary impact to campus technology services. This maintenance must be completed to ensure reliability and availability of IT services and to mitigate the risk of lengthy unplanned service outages related to power disruptions to the data center. UNM IT has been reaching out to stakeholders throughout the UNM community to confirm the timeframe and to notify users about the work that must be completed prior to and during the maintenance.

In addition, a website, itpower.unm.edu, has been created to provide more comprehensive information about affected services.

If you have questions about a specific service, contact itpower@unm.edu.