NOTICE: Planned Maintenance Outage

During the morning of Saturday, September 22, 2012 a maintenance event will occur in the Production South Street Shrewsbury Data Center. This event will result in multiple services being offline as noted below. This is an expansion of a normal monthly maintenance window. It has been expanded due to the amount of work required and the estimated time to complete

WHAT: All services housed in the production South Street Data Center will be unavailable.

WHEN: Saturday, September 22, 2012 from 4:00 am until 12 noon.

WHY: Primarily UITS will be upgrading data storage software and introducing new equipment into the data center. These changes will provide enhanced performance and reliability for the applications in the data center.

IMPACT: From 4:00 am until noon on Saturday, September 22, all services in the Production South Street data center will be unavailable. This includes:

‘ HR Direct and all PeopleSoft Production applications

‘ Identity Management (IdM)

‘ Summit and Cognos/RDS

‘ Sharepoint (Workspaces)

‘ Citrix

‘ Other 3rd party and Departmental applications

‘ Exchange email at UITS (notLowell)’ please note that no emails to President’s Office staff (including UITS) will be sent or delivered during this time

Yesterday afternoon, at approximately 4:45 PM,the University Information Technology Services (UITS) data center experienced a software failure at the storage level oftheir infrastructure. Unfortunately, although they designedtheir systems to be redundant and able to withstand this type of event, that wasn’t the case in this situation. Although roughly half ofthe (redundant) servers were not directly impacted, users could still not access many of our applications.UITS escalated tothe vendor immediately and their technical team was fully engaged to resolve the situation. Systems were starting to come up around 9:00 PM, that process continued for 1-2 hours. UITS and our Lowell campus resources will review this event thoroughly and will incorporate changes to systems and operationsas appropriate.

All IT groups sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and disruption this event caused.

If you have suggestions on how Lowell can better manage these outages, please email our Administrative Systems Integration team at asi@uml.edu