Frequently Asked Questions about the June 8, 2013 Data Center Infrastructure Work
Q. What is happening on June 8, 2013?
A. On Saturday, June 8, 2013, between 4:00AM and 8:00AM ITS will:
- Upgrade our data center firewall
- Removing the F5 ARX File Virtualization server from production
Q. What impact will this have on me?
A. Both items will have a window where services will be unavailable. The firewall manages connections to a lot of services in the data center. This will cause a brief 30 minute disruption in the service.
The ARX brokers connections to the ITS file service. We will be removing this service and replacing it with our distributed file service. This will cause a rolling 15 minute outage in file services during the maintenance window. We advise you to save your files in alternate locations during the maintenance window.
Q. What if the work takes longer than expected or there are other status updates to communicate?
A. If the work takes longer than expected or there are other status updates to communicate, we’ll notify the campus community via the ITS website at http://its.uiowa.edu/, as well as the ITS Alerts and Outages mailing list and RSS feed.
Q. My ITS contact asked me not to schedule major IT work on Saturday, June 8, 2013. What if I cannot delay that work?
A. Please make sure that your ITS contact is aware of your need, and work with that person to develop a plan that helps maintain the integrity of our data center for all campus users.
Q. Is more maintenance work scheduled?
A. ITS use the schedule maintenance windows to ensure proper running of our infrastructure with as little an impact as we can make for doing the work. Depending on the nature of the work that needs to be done, it may have more of a service impact than other work.
The schedule for the Infrastructure Day is posted on the ITS web site. Our next Infrastructure Day will occur on Saturday, June 15, 2013.