ResFS upgrade to impact access in mid-November

From: Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Sent: Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, 1:55 p.m.
To: ResFS Users

As you may know, the Office of Research, Center for Research Computing and KU IT are engaged in a project to replace the Research File Storage (ResFS) appliance later this fall. We want to make you aware that this essential hardware upgrade will impact access to ResFS over for a brief period in mid-November.

Beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, all access, connections or processes that involve data stored on ResFS and the research cluster will be temporarily suspended; any open sessions will be terminated while this upgrade is performed. We anticipate that the upgrade will be complete and full network access restored by 6 a.m. Monday, Nov. 20.

According to current file share permissions, you have access to one or more shares within ResFS. Please consider the following information to prepare for this outage:

  • Access from workstations to ResFS shares will be temporarily unavailable; users should not plan on being able to retrieve data from ResFS during the outage. If there is a critical need to access data during this time, please work with your technical support team in advance to arrange to copy what is needed to an appropriate secure location outside of ResFS.
     
  • Any research computing cycles that pull data from ResFS, or data-copy activities that place data onto shares in ResFS, will not occur during the outage. If there are automated or scheduled activities during this maintenance window, please plan to change automation schedules or suspend and then restart any related processes outside of this timeframe.
     
  • Once the upgrade is complete and service is restored, you may reconnect to ResFS shares and restart any processes, scripts or related activities. There will be no change to namespace, which means that you should expect storage to function as it does today.
     
  • A smaller subset of researchers who use instruments that depend on deprecated versions of Windows (Windows XP, etc.) have been notified by KU IT about the implementation of a secure solution that will enable continued functionality of their instruments. KU IT is working deploying that solution to the identified instruments, and the solution will be in place by Monday, Oct. 16.
     
  • If you work with contractors who currently access ResFS, please inform them of this upgrade and planned outage. They can opt-in to email updates by subscribing to the ResFS project mailing list

The project team has taken great care to plan this essential upgrade of aging equipment with minimal impact to researchers. For the majority of users, the new hardware will not cause changes to routine ResFS access.

Please contact Suzie Johannes at sjohannes@ku.edu if you have questions or concerns about the November outage.

Thank you,
KU Office of Research