The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is cutting and moving fiber on the West Bank in order to accommodate the construction on the 35W Bridge project. Three cables were scheduled to be affected, but there have been some changes to the scope of this project.
The first cable, which connects the West Bank Office Building (WBOB) and the 511 building, was cut on April 25th at 5:00 PM so that the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) could create a new water collection pond. There was a short outage for some services as a result of this cut (for example, BOREAS Net, MnSCU connections), but service was restored ahead of schedule, shortly after midnight.
The second two cables, which feed the WBOB data center and provide network connectivity and phone service to the entire building, were to be lowered five feet because of a change to a 35W off-ramp. This work was originally scheduled for May 2 by Flatiron (a construction contractor for the 35W Bridge project) because of the proximity of our conduit to the installation of a new sewer line. However, because the location for this sewer has now moved and does not conflict with our conduit, Flatiron and MnDOT have determined that OIT is no longer required to move its conduit. Please note that redundant circuits will still be installed in the month of May.
Although the likelihood of this cable becoming damaged as a result of this move was extremely slim, a cut to these cables could have affected a number of applications, including any application that relies on PeopleSoft (such as registration and student records). Therefore, OIT is taking preventative measures to ensure that any potential disaster is averted. The first step in this process was to install a new cable and entrance in WBOB that connects to the rest of the West Bank. After that, OIT began moving links over to this new cable from the at-risk cable in order to add redundancy. OIT has compiled an inventory of the specific links that need to be moved over, and is on track to provide redundancy to the at-risk cable.