University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory - West Cambridge Data Centre full outage for planned electrical works – Maintenance details

Maintenance was completed successfully.

We are aware that some research/teaching virtual machines belonging to individuals and research groups have not automatically started. These are VMs that are not configured to automatically start, so we are not sure whether they are actually meant to be running. If your VM has not started and should be running continuously, contact us and we'll rectify this for next time.

Departmental IT services have been restored. Please contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk if you encounter any remaining problems with these.

University-wide services are still being restored, per UIS's announced schedule, and may not be fully available again until tomorrow.

Some further work is needed to undo some temporary changes to departmental infrastructure, which will take place out-of-hours.

UIS has announced that the planned electrical works in WCDC have completed early. We are starting to restore our services now. This will take time to complete.

Power was unexpectedly restored around 13:10 before the maintenance was announced as complete. This caused many systems to automatically start again. For safety, we are shutting affected systems down again now in case power is again lost.

Maintenance is now in progress. Systems will gradually shut down over the course of this evening, and will not come back up until Thursday evening at the soonest.

We will start with some relatively low-impact network infrastructure firmware upgrades (which will cause intermittent loss of connectivity to Morello systems in WCDC) and storage software updates, and will then proceed to shut down our VM infrastructure.

This maintenance will not start until 17 September. Our status page platform has sent out a couple of incorrect emails about the timing of this maintenance; apologies for the confusion.

UIS have notified us that essential electrical works will be carried out at the West Cambridge Data Centre (WCDC) on 18 September 09:00-17:00. The entire data centre will be switched off all day.

This will affect many departmental services (several of our servers are hosted in WCDC) as well as other services in the broader University. Many departmental services will be shut down on the evening of 17 September and will remain offline until at least the evening of 18 September.

We are planning the precise departmental impact and possible mitigations, and will add more information to this page in due course.

We know however that most departmental-hosted VMs (except GPU VMs) and departmental administrative systems (for example dbwebserver and the underlyng databases) will be shut down for the duration.