Building 240 Data Center (and Building) Power Outage, July 28-31.

Hi, everyone.  If there are three things you can count on as a certainty, there’s “Fast food menu pictures always look better than the actual product”, “Terms and conditions apply means you won’t get what you expect”, and “The 240 Data Center is going to have an outage quarterly.”

Okay, I’m exaggerating. Sometimes the Terms and Conditions are what you expect.  But, in any case, we are going to have a scheduled outage in the Data Center as part of the capacity upgrade for bringing Aurora into being.

As with the last outage, each group will send out notices specific to their user base as to the timing of the shutdown and bring-up.  This serves as a general notice for CELS users as to what aspects of the GCE and Legacy environments will be down.

All computers in the data center will be powered down. In general, you should expect things to shut down by Friday July 28th at 3PM, and return to service at some time on Monday July 31.  For CELS, we’ll begin power up at 8:30am.  The power-on activities need to be coordinated with the facilities staff so the cooling is balanced with the heat output from the equipment.

Most systems in GCE will be unaffected by this as they are hosted in a different data center, however some compute nodes that live in building 240 will be powered off due to this work.  Obviously, all desktops will lose power and will need to be restarted on Monday.  We will send an all clear when we believe everything should be back up, after which you can send a note to help@cels.anl.gov if something you expect to be working isn’t.

All Legacy storage will be offline. As such, homes-legacy.mcs.anl.gov will not be accessible. GCE login/home nodes will continue to operate normally.  Also, if you’re still using Legacy storage, we need to have a chat, because it’s going away this year.