CIS Maintenance Weekend May15-17, 2015

Please see the below announcement from CIS for maintenance work happening this coming weekend. Note the sporadic outages they expect, including e-mail, on Saturday morning and afternoon.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Argonne’s quarterly IT maintenance weekend is scheduled for Friday, May 15th, thru Sunday, May 17th.
We are replacing key elements of our network infrastructure on Saturday, May 16th from 7am-3pm as part of the Network Lifecycle project.
During this time connections to core IT services including the intranet and internet will be sporadic until work is complete.
Specifically:
· Email Services including personal, calendaring and lists
· Cloud services such as Box and Blue Jeans (due to use of on-site authentication services)
· www.anl.gov and inside.anl.gov
· Dash
· VPN
· Wireless
· VOIP Phones
· Pager
· Public Address Services
In addition:
· Voice mail will be unavailable from 5 to 7 p.m., Friday, May 15th. During this time, voice mail messages will not be received nor will they be retrievable.
· All business systems and web applications will be unavailable throughout the duration of the maintenance weekend.
Note:
Not Affected/Minimally Affected:
· Networking that is not located behind the Tier 1 Firewall will NOT be affected.
· Metasys and SCADA systems may experience a short 3-5 minute outage window.
Networking services will be restored on Saturday afternoon and CIS will perform verification of IT services thru Sunday evening May 17th to ensure all services are functioning for business hours on Monday, May 18th.
WHY ARE WE DOING IT?
The replacement of the core switches will allow CIS to build better redundancy into the core network to provide better throughput, reduce risks of spanning tree issues and to reduce the network maintenance impact to the site in the future.
WHEN WILL THIS OCCUR?
May 15th, 2015, 5:00 p.m. thru May 17th, 2015, ~5:00 p.m.
We expect the network maintenance to be complete Saturday afternoon and will then be followed by a verification process after which an “all clear” message will be sent.
We expect application verification to be complete by Sunday at 5p.m. and an “all clear” message will then be sent.
WHAT IS THE EFFECT ON YOU?
Unless there is an unforeseen issue with the maintenance activities, you should not be affected outside of the maintenance window.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Networking Issues:
If you do experience network issues after the “all clear” message on Saturday please send an email message to help outlining the specific issue along with contact information in case we need to follow up for more details. We will be managing the maintenance weekend within service now and monitoring the incoming message queue.
In the case of unforeseen issues regarding sending email to help you can also use the alternate address argonne
Core Services:
Report issues with core services after the maintenance is complete (Monday morning- May 18th) to the Argonne Service Desk at ext. 2-9999 option 2.
Respectfully Submitted,
Argonne Service Desk