According to Erich Matola, chief information officer of Information Technology Services, ITS is finding ways to resolve the issues by increasing the size of the Internet pipe from Fort Collins, which is where CSU-Pueblo’s Internet comes from, and by switching residential hall Internet to broadband. Photo courtesy of http://www.twotsi.com.

Students at Colorado State University-Pueblo should soon notice a decrease in the frequent Internet maintenance that has recently been plaguing those who access the campus Internet. 

According to Erich Matola, chief information officer of Information Technology Services, ITS is finding ways to resolve the issues by increasing the size of the Internet pipe from Fort Collins, which is where CSU-Pueblo’s Internet comes from, and by switching residential hall Internet to broadband.

Of the two potential fixes, switching residential hall Internet to broadband is the most likely to happen quickly.

ITS has been in the process of installing new equipment for a while, and students can expect to run into difficulties accessing Internet until all of the equipment is completely installed and tested, according to Matola.

When the new equipment has been installed, it will include a redundant storage system, new servers, a reliable backup system and a new firewall, according to Matola.

“The old firewall had been long out of warranty and was configured in a way that has been very time consuming in moving all our incoming data into the new modern and reliable firewall.  Basically, we are moving forward, but it’s time consuming for the newly reorganized network team as there was no documentation on the old systems,” Matola said.

When the installations and testing are completed and the redundant data center is turned on, a singular outage will not take the systems down, as they will fail over to the redundant system.

The entire process will take approximately two more months.

The university does have bimonthly scheduled maintenance, but the installation of the new equipment often causes maintenance that was not scheduled.

Overall technology maintenance should decrease dramatically once the new equipment is installed, with Matola saying he would like to see the current maintenance time cut in half once the process is 100 percent complete.

According to Matola, the systems constantly need to be updated due to the rising number of devices that each student needs to connect to the Internet wirelessly.

“A few years ago the average student living on campus had one device that used the Internet wirelessly.  Now it is five to six devices, and more in some cases.  We have started using the newest wireless technology access points and increased the total number of access points in use on campus, but this has not kept up with the issue,” Matola said in an email.