Clarification of press articles about the outage

1. Our network had a flat topology which was required by multiple legacy apps. Our network downtime was caused by having a layer 2 based enterprise network with VLANs that crossed the core.
2. We restored the network by moving portions of the network from switched to routed and eliminating all loops
3. Over the next 6 months we will retire all the offending legacy apps and move to a network that is routed at the distribution and core layers.
4. Cisco flew in a few spare 6509's and configured them just in case our existing 5509's were unable to handle the traffic of our new topology. Since the 6509's were configured by a different team than the team fixing the existing 5509's, this was work done in parallel. The press described this as a complete parallel network, which it was not.
   
5. CIO magazine will devote it's February issue to an in depth look at the architectual flaws in the network. Our hope is that we can broadly share our lessons learned so that other institutions that grew by merger and acquisition will examine their networks and eliminate any flat topologies, preventing the kind of downtime we experienced.