A message from Mike Fraser (Director of Infrastructure Services):
Dear colleagues,
It is planned to power-down the IT Services data centre at Banbury Road on Saturday, 6 September 2014 with the loss of a significant number of IT services. This outage is necessary in order for Estates Services to replace the end-of-life cooling system, which uses a refrigerant that will be illegal to maintain beyond December 2014; fit a by-pass switch to the data centre UPS to allow us to carry out maintenance on the UPS without the need to shut down the whole data centre; and to undertake mandatory electrical testing. The work is expected to be undertaken from 0800 with restoration of services by 1700. It is likely that some services that cannot be kept running will be powered down the previous evening (Friday 5 Sept) from 1700 onwards.
We are assessing the impact to IT services hosted in the data centre and, where possible, putting in place workarounds in order to try and minimise the overall impact to the University. We do not yet have a definitive list of services that will be unavailable on 6 Sept and so at this point in time all networked services provided by IT Services should be considered at risk on that day (with potential impact on local services). We intend to communicate a list of affected services by 6 August with further reminders leading up to 6 September.
Given the number of individual pieces of hardware that will be powered-down on 6 September, and the risk of hardware failure, it is likely that some services will not come back on line within the expected time period. We will endeavour to maintain frequent communications to IT support staff during any period of service outage.
If you have any immediate concerns or questions please email help@it.ox.ac.uk in the first instance.
With regards,
Mike
