Safe Assign Hardware Expansion Blackboard is pleased to announce that we are completing a very important upgrade to SafeAssign that will increase the reliability and performance of the SafeAssign product. To complete this project, SafeAssign will be taken offline on Saturday, August 13, to upgrade all SafeAssign hardware and failover systems. This notification contains important details regarding this planned SafeAssign downtime, so please be sure to review this entire message. Scheduled Downtime and Impact of Downtime The SafeAssign service will be unavailable on Saturday August 13, 2011 from 8:00 AM US Eastern (GMT -4) until Saturday August 13, 2011 at 11:59 PM US Eastern (GMT-4). During this outage SafeAssign will be unavailable. End-users will not be able to submit papers through SafeAssign during the planned downtime and will receive an error message if they attempt to do so. SafeAssign Originality Reports will not be available to Instructors or Students during the planned downtime, nor will Instructors be able to access SafeAssign DirectSubmit. Please make end-users aware of these limitations. Clients will be notified via the SafeAssign Status RSS feed when the service is restored. Use of SafeAssign can continue as normal after the planned downtime and hardware upgrade are complete. Reasons for this Hardware Upgrade The usage of SafeAssign has consistently increased at a rate of 140% to 200% year-over-year since its launch in 2007. The steadily increasing usage has taxed the current hardware environment in which the SafeAssign central service runs. This has been experienced by SafeAssign users in the form of slow turnaround times for submitted papers, particularly during the peak months (Oct-Nov and Apr-May) of the 2010-2011 academic year. In order to continue to serve SafeAssign users, Blackboard has engaged in a project to improve the reliability, performance and scalability of the SafeAssign environment. Technology Changes
- Additional CPU and memory for every component of the system thus increasing the overall throughput
- A significant increase in the number of servers that process papers to speed up the processing during high submission periods
- Failover protection to critical parts of the application to increase reliability and uptime of the system
- Overall better monitoring of the SafeAssign application to proactively react to system problems before they can impact end-users
- Increased processing capacity increases the reliability of SafeAssign. Increased capacity should reduce the number of delayed Originality Reports as well as improve the processing speed of the SafeAssign application.
- Improved SafeAssign monitoring provides increased insight into SafeAssign performance. This increased visibility to SafeAssign will alert Blackboard of any slowdowns in processing earlier, so our team can be more responsive.
- An updated architecture increases the scalability of SafeAssign. The new hardware architecture for SafeAssign has been designed to allow for expansion as SafeAssign usage continues to grow in the future.