About NOC

The Network Operations Center at Portland State University is directly responsible for the campus network infrastructure that supports faculty, staff and student uses of technology campus-wide. The NOC also maintains monitoring systems to ensure service availability and acceptable levels of performance. The NOC supports the Shattuck Hall datacenter, which houses many critical campus-wide servers and other services, and manages a centralized backup system. The NOC works closely with the Telecommunications department, which provides physical wiring installation and support. Cooperatively, the NOC and the College of Engineering and Computer Science manage the wide-area connections that link PSU to the Internet, Internet2 and regional institutions.

OIT Server Backup System Overview

OIT backs up server data files to a Qualstar 4440, updated to model 4480, tape backup library tower holding 84 Sony AIT-2 8mm size tapes. Within it there is a rotating carousel with four faces holding two ten tape magazines per face (2 x 4 x 10 + 4 utility slots = 84). The two faces are addressed by a vertically sliding handler which grabs the needed tapes and places them in one of the four tape drives at the command of the controlling backup server software. Each tape can hold approximately 45-70 gigabytes of data depending on types of files to be saved. Tape drive hardware compression is turned on during backups.

The current system that controls all this is a Dell PowerEdge 2300 server, running at 350 MHz with 256MB memory. The operating system is Microsoft Windows. The installed backup software product working across the PSU backbone is Veritas (formerly Seagate) Backup Exec version 8.5. Through this software, the PSUOIT/Network Operations Center currently has backup procedures set up for 27 Netware servers of various versions and nine MS NT servers.

Server Backup Schedule

OIT runs full backups on all servers on a two-week rotation with six-month archive tape retention. The full backups are started Friday nights at 7:30 pm and run into the weekend. The ten Netware servers associated with the Novell Groupwise e-mail system also have full backups run on the alternate weekends with the Groupwise components shut down for the full backups on these servers. There are daily differential (changed files since the last full backup) backups run weekdays between the full backups on the weekends. The schedule for preset backup jobs is controlled by the Veritas Backup Exec Job Monitor/Show Scheduled Jobs.