ITSS News
ITSS moving to new Data Center
Major service outages planned
ITSS is the proud owner of a new data center in Kirby Plaza. Many thanks to Facilities Management staff who worked with our consultant and contractors on this major project. This new, state-of-the-art facility will minimize service outages in the future.
Unfortunately, we will need to shut services down over the next three weekends as we move more than 85 servers and other systems from racks in our old data center to our new data center. Most of the work will be done off-hours on Saturdays and possibly Sundays during the next three weekends. Service interruptions, some of which may exceed four or five hours, will be common on these days. Details on each weekend are included below.
During the times that our web site is available the status of server moves for the day will be kept current on the ITSS web page: ITSS Home.
Thanks for your patience during these weekend outages.
Weekend of July 12-13
During the weekend of July 12 and 13, you can expect the following services to be down during part of the weekend:
- Authentication services. This impacts many things, including network connectivity. We will be doing this first thing in the morning and hope to be done by 9 AM or 10 AM at the latest.
- Access to the UMD modem pool will not be available in the early morning.
- Authentication in some computing labs will not work in the early morning.
- Reading email, webmail, and sending email may not work during parts of the day.
- Online forms that process credit cards will not work.
- Internet/email account passwords can not be changed.
- Web Crossing and Test Pilot will not be available
- CED web site and email will not be available
- CAIMH and CLA servers will not be available
Weekend of July 19-20
The largest move and most significant impact will occur on Saturday, July 19. We will be moving our Storage Area Network (SAN) server, which stores data for many of our primary services. Our SAN vendor will be on site to pack and move this critical system. All servers attached to the SAN will be powered off and moved to the new data center as well. Services that will be affected include:
- Office server - no login, access to files or printing. Customers on Windows computers will need to login to their computers as "workstation only". If you anticipate needing access to files over the weekend, please download them to your computer prior to Saturday.
- Computing labs - no access to application software or printing.
- UMD web site and web sites hosted by UMD web server (domain.d.umn.edu, UMD.com sites) - not available. Visitors will be redirected to a temporary web page.
- Email (both client-based and Webmail) - not available during parts of the day.
- File storage (Samba myFiles & myWeb, ub home directory) - not available.
- VPN service - not available early morning.
- VMWare servers - not available (affected customers will be contacted directly).
- WebDrop and WebCrossing - not available.
- Online forms that access the campus database servers will not work.
- Online forms that process credit cards will not work.
- Internet/email account passwords can not be changed.
Weekend of July 26-27
At this time, no outages are scheduled for this weekend. However, we are reserving this weekend to move any servers or systems that were not previously moved.
Update: 7.21.08: ITSS staff have completed the move of all major servers/services to the new data center. No service outages are scheduled for this weekend.
Rev: 07.21.08