Upcoming Notification of Data Center Shut Down Jan. 2-3, 2021

October 16, 2020

Dear colleagues,

We wanted to provide advance notice to our One IT community that next week we will be sending the following message out campus-wide (to all students, faculty, and staff) regarding the Data Center Shutdown which will occur Jan. 2-3, 2021. Be sure to check out the FAQs page for additional details and contact David Rieger, who is the Project Manager for this event at drieger@berkeley.edu if you have questions.

Thank you,

Jenn

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To our campus community,

We are writing to inform you of a necessary shutdown of our Data Center scheduled to start Saturday, Jan. 2, with completion planned by Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021. This work is required to support the campus research mission by enabling new research systems and to provide improved resilience for these systems when running on generator power during campus power outages. 

As you may know, the Data Center houses many of our mission-critical servers on campus so powering things off will impact access to many systems including CalTime, Cal Central, Student Information Systems (SIS), Cal Answers, Berkeley Financial System (BFS), BearBuy, Production Control Shared Services Center (PCSSC) and Savio Condo/Berkeley Research Cluster, to name a few. We understand this may disrupt your ability to work but have purposefully scheduled the outage during a time period when the use of systems is reduced in an attempt to minimize the overall impact to campus.

Systems Not Impacted

Major services that will NOT be affected by this outage, and will be available during the weekend include:

  • Active Directory

  • bConnected (bMail, bCal, bDrive, Hangouts Meet, Gchat)

  • bCourses / Canvas (however some tools/functionality will be affected)

  • CalNet Authentication (CAS, Shibboleth)

  • Campus Network

  • Candelis

  • Duo (CalNet 2-Step)
  • Infoblox (DNS/DHCP)

  • JamF

  • Palo Alto shared Firewall

  • Salesforce

  • ServiceNow

  • SharePoint

  • Slack

  • VPN (restricted VPN only by request)

  • Websites hosted on Open Berkeley/ Pantheon or other off-campus providers

  • Wi-Fi network (pending work to remove database dependency due for completion October 2020)

  • www.berkeley.edu home page (some linked sites will be affected)

  • xMatters

  • Zoom


Overall status during the outage will be communicated on the system status webpage. Service providers will also communicate status updates related to their services as they are shut down prior to the power work, and as they are restored afterwards.

Contact

We appreciate your patience and cooperation as we complete this important infrastructure work. Please visit our FAQs page for additional details on this topic, any other concerns about this necessary maintenance activity can be directed to David Rieger at drieger@berkeley.edu

Regards,

Jenn Stringer, Associate Vice Chancellor for IT and Chief Information Officer
Dave Browne, Director of IST-Infrastructure Services and Telecommunications