The William Gates Building will be without power all day on Sunday 14th January 2024, due to planned work on our electrical switch gear to connect our new solar panels. This is the second and final shutdown planned as part of the solar panel installation.
Nearly all IT services in the William Gates Building will be unavailable for roughly 24 hours, perhaps longer. We will start shutting systems down on the evening of Saturday 13th January ready for the power to be turned off the following morning; we expect the power to come back on during the evening of Sunday 14th January but it will then take some time to bring all systems back into operation. We expect most services to be available by Monday morning, but there is a small chance that a few things won't initially be working properly on Monday.
Telephones, office networking and wifi will be unavailable all day on Sunday (but the building is likely to be closed in any case). Please make sure that all computers in offices are shut down (not just asleep) before Saturday evening.
Due to the longer outage this time, we will unfortunately need to shut down all servers in GN09 except for a very small number of critical services such as filer, as the cooling system will be offline all day and temperatures would otherwise climb to unsafe levels.
This includes nearly all research servers and all GPU servers (including GPU VMs). GN09 holds almost all of our server hardware; if you are unsure where your server is located, it is probably in GN09 and will probably be affected. (A very small number of research systems are in the West Cambridge Data Centre, and will not be affected.)
The outage is not expected to affect core infrastructure, administrative systems or small VMs as these are hosted in the West Cambridge Data Centre. However there is a risk that access to filer from these systems will be disrupted; we don't plan to turn filer off, but it is in GN09 and we may have to act if it gets too hot. Where a service is replicated between multiple sites, only one instance of the service may be available (this affects most core services such as LDAP, Active Directory and VPN2).
VMs hosted by the department will stay running unless they are on the GPU VM clusters (this applies both to VMs with GPUs, and VMs with a lot of CPU cores - generally with names that contain "gpu" or "cpu").
Services hosted externally to the department, for example by UIS, will not be affected - for example Moodle, CamSIS, HPC, Exchange email, Fastmail email and the main departmental (CST) website.
