Work continues to restore state computers

RICHMOND

Virginia's centralized information technology superagency continued work Friday on restoring an outage that left several state agencies unable to do their work.

The problem-plagued Virginia Information Technologies Agency said it would bring services up throughout the day after maintenance and repair work was completed overnight.

At least two dozen agencies and about one-fifth of state government's computers were affected by the Wednesday afternoon crash. The agency has to replace the flawed components and reboot the massive storage network and the servers it supplies. Officials had said full function may not be restored until Monday.

More than 60 percent of the servers attached to the state's storage system have been fixed and are operational as of 10 a.m. Friday State agencies are testing those servers.

But officials say the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles still can't process driver's licenses and some other agencies continue to be impacted.

The failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a "storage area network," or SAN, at VITA's large suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems in different parts of Virginia.

The system was built with redundancies and backup storage. It was hailed as being able to suffer a failure to one part but continue uninterrupted service because standby parts or systems would take over. But when the memory card failed Wednesday, a fallback that attempted to shoulder the load began reporting multiple errors.

VITA and its corporate partner, Northrop Grumman, have been criticized in scathing reports from the General Assembly's investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, for cost overruns, service outages, slow service and delays that have paralyzed state agencies numerous times since the agency was established in 2003.

VITA's 10-year, $2.4 billion contract with the government contracting giant is the largest in Virginia history with a single vendor.