Our current NetApp fileservice architecture has multiple hostnames pointing to the same IP address. As a performance measure, we will be introducing some new IP addresses for some of the hostnames, very early on Tuesday, March 15. If you have any custom firewall rules for the current IP addresses, you may need to modify them to include the new ones.

This change should not create any interruption in service. Any active mounts of the former IP addresses will continue to work.

When fileservice was restored after the PG&E outage last Friday, the part of the service that handles backups became non-functional. Staff are working to restore backup service as soon as possible.

Snapshots remain functional and available, providing easy access to file versions from the last 7 days. Older archive backups, from before October 9, also remain available. The broken archiving process means that backups after Oct 9 will not be available.

We make nightly copies of current fileserver data to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC). This mirror of current data remains operational, and is not affected by the archive process failure.

On Monday evening, July 22, we will be taking the next step in our fileserver migration: moving network interfaces from the old system to the new system. This will result in brief interruptions of access to home directories and project shares.

Our expectation is that each move of a network interface should only take a minute or so, and that most NFS and CIFS clients will likely recover just fine without a reboot. Any ongoing file copies or moves will be interrupted and terminated; any unsaved file editing should be closed before the maintenance period.

For any systems experiencing issues after maintenance is completed, a reboot would be recommended.

As part of our NetApp fileserver refresh cycle, we have a NetApp technician scheduled to be on site June 19, to assist with installation of the new hardware, and transfer of storage racks from the old NetApp system to the new one. Work is planned to take place between noon and 2pm.

Our expectation is that this work will not be disruptive to existing fileservice, but it involves a good amount of work around the existing hardware, so there is potential for unexpected problems.

NetApp filers are due for their 4 year refresh cycle. Work on this has commenced, with new NetApp hardware on site. New filers are going to be added and data migration will occur some weeks down the road. While most of the work will be non-disruptive, some elements will be disruptive.

The first of this will happen on 10th June Monday, and the scheduled downtime will be from 6-8pm, to incorporate some network changes. All NFS and CIFS access to the filer (home and project storage) will be down during that time.