JASMIN maintenance & at-risk periods May 2020

Scheduled network maintenance on JASMIN is planned for Wednesday 13th May which requires a JASMIN downtime affecting CEDA and JASMIN systems including access to the CEDA Archive and JASMIN community cloud

In addition electrical work planned elsewhere on the RAL site has a small risk of loss of power to the JASMIN data centre around the Bank Holiday weekend (22nd-25th May). The risk of disruption is small but would result in all JASMIN and CEDA services being offline for several days if power was lost.

The following work is currently scheduled for these dates:

Wednesday 13th May: Downtime for JASMIN network maintenance
There will be a network change sometime between 6am and 12 noon which will interrupt storage access for ALL virtual machines (and any JASMIN or CEDA services running on them).
This work was originally scheduled on 21st April and is part of a long programme of work to improve storage access and reliability during 2020.

In addition to all virtual machines and data transfer servers, the LOTUS batch processing cluster will be unavailable for the duration of the work, to avoid running jobs being adversely affected. The batch reservation will start at 06:00 on 13th May, but any job submitted before that with a running time that goes over the reservation period will not start until after the reservation has finished.

22nd-25th May : Low “At risk” period due to electrical work on site.
During this period, work is being undertaken on the STFC RAL site (JASMIN’s host institution) as part of the construction of the new Rosalind Franklin Institute. Electrical work aims to connect this new facility to the site high-voltage supply which also supplies JASMIN. There is a small risk of loss of power to the JASMIN data centre while this work is undertaken. Loss of power would disrupt all CEDA and JASMIN services, and other STFC network services, which support remote working for STFC and JASMIN support staff, for many days if it happened.

To mitigate this impact STFC Estates, in association with the electrical contractor, SSE, will provide suitable generator capacity to cover the period of 5-7 days for which the main feed will be down.

In addition , because a power off restart procedure would take several days , especially because of the implications of social distancing protocols, it has been agreed that JASMIN/CEDA services would take priority during such an operation.

With apologies for any inconvenience caused,

JASMIN Team