[Academic] Fwd: Possible loss of most ISD services this weekend

[Robert Martin]

Dear All,
See below regarding likely loss of IT capability over the weekend.

 If you have any events planned for the weekend, please let Ronnie Wallace know immediately.  r.wallace at strath.ac.uk<mailto:r.wallace at strath.ac.uk>

Regards

Rob


-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        [isd-major-incident] Update on SAN
Date:   Wed, 6 Mar 2013 18:01:57 +0000
From:   Catherine McMillan

To:     ISD Major Incidents email list


Dear All,

You are all aware of the continuing situation with the SAN.  Our supplier, ORACLE, has yet to come up with a resolution or indeed a cause of the fault.  However their current advice is that they believe the fault will be cleared by a controlled shutdown, reboot and restart of the SAN fabric and all the services that depend upon it.  As this is impacting on both the corporate systems and infrastructure system side of the SAN it would close almost all services.  It is perhaps easier to say it would leave us with: - network access, the software on the PCs, WiFi, Web Access and the web site (in an non-updatable way).

We have explained to ORACLE that this is for us a worse-case scenario and disruption on a huge scale for the entire University.  However compared to an uncontrolled loss of the SAN it would protect the University from potentially damaging data loss.  We are thus telling ORACLE that they must continue to put all their resources into a less disrupting fix.

However given the scale and breadth involved in taking the SAN down,  we must start planning now for this worse-case scenario, a full outage of the SAN, over this coming weekend.  This outage will last something approaching 7 hours.

We cannot commence the outage on Friday evening.  This would interrupt the administrative systems overnight batch runs.  The outage would be most likely to occur sometime on Saturday.  The exact time based on attempting to minimise the impact (although it will be substantial at any time) and the availability of some dozens of staff who will be working on taking services down and restarting them.
The most likely times to start being either 6am on Saturday morning  or 6pm on Saturday evening.  The outage could not be done on the Sunday, as with work on this scale there is a requirement to contingency on the Sunday.

I would ask you to get back to me early tomorrow with any details of events, classes, on-going activity that you know of for this weekend to help us plan both to minimise disruption and ensure everyone who has to know, does know.

We can only apologise for this disruption.

Catherine

Catherine McMillan
Assistant Director (Technical Services)
Information Services Directorate
University of Strathclyde Alexander
Turnbull Building
155 George Street Glasgow
G1 1RD

Tel: 0141 548 4278 or 5763
Mobile: 07870 874026
Fax: 0141 548 4216

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC015263

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