Tonight we are young...

This weekend we're doing a major upgrade of our netapps storage, and during the downtime, will make some other changes including spinning some cabinets to improve cooling in the data centre. This obviously requires some downtime, and just organising an appropriate time to do it can be a nightmare. We have to take into account availability of our staff and of our consultant engineers, other work we're doing over the summer, and of course disruption to University processes. I remember when it was relatively easy to say systems would be down all weekend, or even for most of the morning during a working week. No chance now, as everything is very dependent on IT systems being available.

So, we started thinking we might take things down on Friday night and aim to have them up Saturday afternoon, but it soon became apparent that there were pockets of the University who needed them up earlier, so my wonderful team have agreed to work through the night on the upgrade, with the application support team working early Saturday morning to get everything back up hopefully by 9am. This will be no mean feat. We have a blog about the upgrade, hosted off site so it can be accessed during the work, and the list of things they will be doing is here. It will be kept updated, and we'll be tweeting updates as well.  Pizzas will be supplied, and plenty of coffee will be available. Good luck to the team - I know they can do it!

I like quirky things, and have just come across this video which kept me amused for a few minutes:



I often wonder how things like this were made, and this particular one took 238 takes!  You can see some of them here.