Planned Outages

[russellw]

Good morning

We are in the process of migrating AFF to new server hardware which will be a two step process involving two outage windows.

The first of these will be from 01:30 Saturday March 26th until about 04:30 Saturday March 26th.

During this outage one of the hard disks will be removed from the current server and added to the new one for cloning purposes.

Note: During this period there is some risk to service continuity because removal of the drive necessitates breaking the current Hardware RAID and leaves us reliant on a single disk drive but it's an acceptable level of risk.

The second step will be scheduled at a later date after the cloning and testing of the new server has been completed but we are currently planning the second outage window for the period from 01:00 Monday March 28th until about 05:30 Monday March 28th.

During this outage the database on the new server will be updated to reflect changes made since the clone and the IP addresses swapped between the old and new servers so that DNS continues to work.

We've had more than 5 years use out of this kit so it's more than done what was expected of it and the new server will provide improved performance and greater resilience to failure.

Best regards
Russ

PS: There will now be a 3rd step as we have discovered that one of the hard drives in the current server has failed. There will also be an outage at 01:00 tomorrow (Friday) morning to replace that hard drive. This should take no more than 90 minutes allowing for a backup to be taken before that work commences.

During this outage window we will be replacing a failed hard disk in the server. There will be a degradation in system performance for approximately 12 hours after this is done as the RAID array rebuilds itself.