ResFS upgrade, service outage rescheduled to Dec. 15

From: Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Sent: Monday, Nov. 13, 2023, 3:06 p.m.
To: ResFS Users

The final phase of the Office of Research, Center for Research Computing and KU IT project to replace the university’s Research File Storage (ResFS) is now planned to begin Friday, Dec. 15.

The project team has made significant progress preparing to move to new ResFS hardware. All files and shares have been replicated successfully to the new storage system, where testing has shown significantly higher performance than on the previous platform. To allow time for additional testing to ensure a seamless user experience, the cutover that was scheduled to begin Friday, Nov. 17 has been rescheduled to mid-December.

Beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15, all access, connections and processes that involve data stored on ResFS and the research cluster will be suspended temporarily; any open sessions will be terminated while this upgrade is performed. We anticipate that the upgrade will take approximately 72 hours, but we will confirm via email when the cutover is complete and full network access is restored.

Please consult this to-do list for action steps and reminders:

Preparing for the outage

  • Contact all members of your research team, including users external to KU and others currently accessing ResFS, to inform them of the upgrade and planned service outage. They can opt in to the project mailing list to receive email updates.
  • Prior to 5 p.m. Dec. 15, please make certain everyone is logged off the server, including subcontractors and others who access the server remotely.
    • If there is a critical need to access data during the planned outage window, please work with your technical support team in advance to arrange to copy what is needed to an appropriate secure location outside of ResFS.
    • If there are automated or scheduled activities during this maintenance window, please change automation schedules or suspend and then restart any related processes outside of this timeframe.
  • For a small subset of researchers, KU IT will deploy a secure solution that will enable instruments that depend on deprecated versions of Windows (Windows XP, etc.) to continue functioning after the upgrade.

After the outage

  • You will receive an email once the upgrade is complete. At that time, please verify you have access to your data.
  • Once service is restored, you may reconnect to ResFS shares and restart any processes, scripts or related activities. There will be no change to namespace; you should expect storage to function as it does today.

The project team continues to take great care to plan this essential upgrade of aging equipment with minimal impact to researchers. Please contact Suzie Johannes at sjohannes@ku.edu if you have questions or concerns about the outage. 

Thank you,
KU Office of Research