News
IT services unavailability
Update Friday 12 September 2008
Yesterday evening's maintenance on the central storage system was completed successfully and service restored at around 6:30 p.m.
Our monitoring systems show that filestore and allied services are fully operational. Please report any difficulties that you may have to the IT Service Desk, so that action can be taken promptly to follow up on any problem reports.
We are continuing to work with our suppliers, Sun and LSI, to address the underlying problem that has required the recent storage outages. Hence, whilst further downtime cannot be entirely ruled out, we do not anticipate that this will be necessary until the next scheduled software update.
We will be reducing the need for 'downtime' for storage maintenance and troubleshooting in future by replicating the central storage pool to our Disaster Recovery site at Holywell Park. The equipment needed for this work is presently on order. We will send out a status update to advise you once it has been commissioned.
IT Services
Proposed IT service down-time: Thursday 11 September 2008 from 5:00 p.m.
As previously notified at www.lboro.ac.uk/computing/news/unavailability-0808.html, the main storage system has an on-going hardware issue which has been preventing us from allocating the required staff and student storage capacity for the new academic year. Our hardware suppliers have been working on the problem and although they have identified the area of the problem, there is, as yet no fix. However, to work around this issue and enable us to allocate the required storage capacity in time for the start of term, the suppliers have advised us to arrange one further outage on the system so that the new disks can be brought safetly on-line.
The services will be taken out of use at 5:00pm on Thursday 11th September and will be brought back some time during that evening. If the timing is of particular difficulty for your department, please let IT Services Service Desk know as soon as possible so that we can try to make alternative arrangements for you. Please note, though, that this work is essential to the services for the start of term, so please try to bear with us on this.
We are expecting to be able to keep email and Learn service running throughout and will let you know early next week if this is not possible. Therefore, the list of services unavailable will be:
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Staff Individual Filestore (U: drives),
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Staff Shared Filestore (Y: drives),
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Departmental filestore held on central services e.g. Estates X: drive,
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Student Individual Filestore (U: drives),
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Student Group Filestore,
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Staff Apps (old CIS application),
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Learn archive,
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Staff and Student Home Pages,
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Labs and Staff PC ghost images.
If your department has a serious concern with the timing of this work, please contact the IT Services Helpdesk extension 2320 or IT.Services@lboro.ac.uk so that we can look at ways for you to work around the down-time or, exceptionally, rearrange this essential systems work.
We apologise for the difficulties this down-time will cause,
IT Services