Editor's note: All of the maintenance work described here has been postponed. Information Services will announce new dates soon.
File shares, network access and other technology services at the University of Oregon could be affected by early-morning work on UO's data center upgrade this October.
First, on Tuesday, Oct. 17, from 5 to 7 a.m., Information Services will move a central network access control system to the new data center environment.
No service interruptions are expected that morning. However, people may be intermittently unable to access the UO wireless network, the wired network in UO residence halls, or any of the university's virtual private network services, including UO VPN.
Information Services will also move two other critical infrastructure components this month, on Wednesday, Oct. 18, and Wednesday, Oct. 25. Both of those early-morning migrations, rescheduled from September, have the potential to affect a range of UO technology services.
Departmental file shares will likely experience 15 to 20 minutes of downtime during the Oct. 18 work, between 5 and 7 a.m. Information Services encourages people to avoid using file shares during that window while a critical central storage system is moved to the new data center.
Other services may also be affected by the Oct. 18 work. Although many major systems use the storage, few will experience downtime during the migration. Information Services has been coordinating with IT staff throughout the university to plan or avoid service outages during the migration.
"Information Services has worked diligently to minimize impacts of this infrastructure move through coordination and early-morning scheduling," said Barry Peterson, director of core infrastructure. "However, this storage system is used in such diverse ways by teams outside IS that we can't list every service that might experience downtime during the migration."
Then on Oct. 25, from 5 to 7 a.m., Information Services will move an infrastructure component that helps direct and balance traffic for UO IT system usage. That component is designed to facilitate maintenance work without service disruptions.
However, minor interruptions may still occur.
If so, a wide variety of services could be affected, including Shibboleth single sign-on; many UO websites; some aspects of the UO email system; the network access control system mentioned above; University Housing's dining point-of-sale system; Talapas, the high-performance computing cluster; and applications such as DuckWeb, Banner, DegreeGuide, AppWorx, DuckDocs, EMS room scheduling and Integrated Data and Reporting (Cognos).
Information Services posts notices about upcoming service outages on the IT Service Status website. That's also where staff will post updates if maintenance schedules change, as well as in-the-moment updates if the work runs long or causes unexpected problems.
Anyone with specific questions about whether departmental IT systems will be affected by the Oct. 18 work should contact the IT staff who support their unit. People with general questions can contact the Technology Service Desk.
—By Nancy Novitski, University Communications