John is keeping us updated on Unify production problems, which unfortunately occur rather frequently.  When he cited the reason for performance issues in his orginal e-mail message below, I asked him whether or not the Unify team was aware ahead of time that the server resynchronization was being handled during normal business hours.  Here is his response.  I bring this to your attention not to create an issue, but rather to solve one.  I know that everyone is incredibly busy, but with so many interdepencies here we have to stay closely coordinated.  I know that EOL has a dedicated member of your team who is always on point and knowledgeable about infrastructure issues that could or do touch EOL.  Is there anyone assigned from your team for a similar role with our critical operating systems?  Because of nomination deadlines and the exchange of information with external parties for Unify, it can create real exposure (dollar exposure and PR exposure) if Unify's performance is impaired.  Let me know if you can assign someone from the infrastructure team that can wear the responsiblity of staying in step with Unify.  Thanks.  --Sally 
-----Original Message-----
From: Warner , John 
Sent: Monday, October 1, 2001 9:20 AM
To: Beck, Sally
Subject: RE: Unify Operational Status


Unfortunately, we didn't get a notification - we played detective.
 
In their defense, they had tried to do the resynchronization after-hours a couple of times and it failed, so they were somewhat desperate to get this done.  Nonetheless, a phone call should have been made to our team in advance.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Beck, Sally 
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2001 9:00 AM
To: Warner , John 
Subject: FW: Unify Operational Status
 
Thanks for the updates.  When we had the problem with the server resynchronization, did someone from the Infrastructure team alert you ahead of time that they were going to do this during normal business hours, or did you have to be the detective to determine the cause once the problem was at hand.  Let me know. Thanks. --Sally 
-----Original Message-----
From: Warner , John 
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 6:01 PM
To: Rao, Ramesh; Beck, Sally; Piper, Greg; Perlman, Beth; Pena, Matt; Hall, Bob M; Superty, Robert; Pickering, Mark
Subject: Unify Operational Status
Here is a summary of Unify operations for today.  My plan was to provide these reports to this audience through the end of this week, and then pick up again during next bid week.  I'll be glad to continue this type of reporting moving forward, please let me know if you are interested.  Alternatively, I could move to a weekly reporting of issues, and/or change the audience of this report.  Your feedback on the matter is appreciated.
 
Summary of 9/28:
?         Heavy activity in the Gas system, especially in the afternoon.  System performance dropped during the afternoon, but no downtime was experienced. 
?         At just after 3:00 pm, a network server experienced problems and as a result one of our EDI servers was unable to accept new files.  No EDI files could be sent to our hub as a result.  As it turns out, the Infrastructure team was in the process of performing a critical re-synchronization on that server, and the server was unable to write new data to disk for over an hour (during re-synchronization this window is typically just a few minutes).  Infrastructure typically conducts resynchronizations after-hours, but resynchronization had failed on this box on several prior attempts, so the issue had become critical.  At 4:26 pm, the re-synchronization completed and all EDI files in the queue were processed normally, and our 5:00 pm intraday nom deadline was met.  
Action Items:
o        The network servers referenced are to be decommissioned on October 5th, and will be replaced with newer more reliable servers.  This is part of a planned project within the Infrastructure team. 
o        I have discussed the issue with the Infrastructure team and communicated our various intra-day processing deadlines.  They have committed to notifying the Unify team in the event future emergency-type maintenance is required during business hours. 
?         On the Power side, we have caught up on all of our processing that was delayed as a result of yesterday's outage.