The Journal

Media Credit: Kholood Eid Matt Sauerwein and Keith Baumen, an engineer with Eaton from North Carolina, inspect power supply going from the generator to the server room located on the ground floor of Webster Hall on Aug. 31.

A malfunctioning piece of equipment revealed flaws in Webster University's networking and telephone systems Wednesday, Aug. 26.

The uninterrupted power supply (UPS), used to ensure critical networking equipment never goes down, created the very problem it was supposed to protect against.

Engineers from Eaton Corporation, the manufacturer of the Powerware 9395 UPS used by WU, were on campus until Aug. 31, trying to find out why the UPS failed. The cause of the failure had not yet been determined by the time The Journal went to press early Wednesday morning.

While the cause of the failure is being investigated, WU's server room is running off electricity supplied by the generator next to Webster Hall. The server room was renovated over the spring of 2009. The total cost of the generator, replacing old equipment, the UPS, and other renovations was about $1.6 million, according to WU IT staff.

"They've gathered as much information as they can and they're synthesizing that information right now," said Ben Hockenhull, WU's deputy chief information officer. "But they are still investigating the cause."

Early Wednesday morning, shortly after 5 a.m., the UPS failed and left WU's entire network and phone system out of service for more than an hour. While WU has experienced network outages before, the installation of the new voice over IP (VOIP) phones over the summer rendered the phones useless as well.

"Everything shut down," said Larry Haffner, the vice president of information technology. "Every network, every server, every phone system."

During the network outage it was revealed that some of the emergency call boxes located around campus do not work without the network. Pressing the red emergency button on the "code blue" boxes routes a call directly to the public safety office. Without the network public safety is not able to receive the calls.

"If there is no phone line, they would not work," said Tracy Winka, a manager in the public safety office.

WU has a mixture of emergency call boxes, some connected to the phone lines and others that route calls to the dispatchers radio. There are 13 emergency call boxes located inside elevators and three "code blue" boxes around campus that rely on the phone system. There are 21 emergency call boxes that work through radio signals and do not require the phone system.

Public safety has no control over the network, but should the network and phones fail again, their plan is to notify students and staff through the Webster Alerts system.

"We have a cell phone that we keep at dispatch and we'll give that number out," Winka said. "If anybody needs to call we always have a backup."

The main concern is to figure out why the UPS failed and how to prevent the server room from shutting down again. WU's server room, located on the ground floor of Webster Hall, is powered by two sources of electricity, one coming from AmerenUE and the other from a power generator located next to Webster Hall. The Eaton Powerware 9395 is supposed to ensure that the power always stays on by monitoring both sources of electricity and automatically switching the source in case one fails.

Eaton Corporation literature states that the Powerware 9395 is designed to not fail in the manner it did at WU.

"Even if presented with the most severe power problems, power output remains stable and in the event of a power failure, there is no delay transferring to backup power," according to a company statement about the Eaton Powerware 9395.

But the problem was not caused by a power outage. Both the generator and the electricity coming from AmerenUE were functional. UPS systems are designed to be self-aware, meaning if the UPS starts malfunctioning it is designed to put itself into bypass mode.

"(In bypass mode), it'll take itself out of the flow and just start passing power directly," Haffner said. "It panicked and didn't go into the bypass mode and shut down."

When the UPS shut down, the server room was left without any source of electricity.

"This is never supposed to happen," Heffner said. "The entire point of (the UPS) is to avoid that."

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