SAN firmware update April 2015
Our two Dothill SAN storage boxes in the Informatics Forum are due a firmware update. Due to their built-in redundancy, the upgrades are supposed to be safe to do without affecting their operation. In fact we’ve already done a similar device at KB (that we use for our off-site copy of user’s data) without issue.
However, given the potential disruption that would caused if they do go off-line during the update (between them they have 100TB of storage), we will do the update this weekend, one on Saturday starting at 9am, the other on Sunday at 9am. The bulk of AFS file space should be considered at risk between 9am – 1pm on both days.
Home directories on the Appleton Tower servers (naga, cetus, gorgon and minotaur) are not at risk. Use the “homedir” command to see which server you are on. eg:
neilb> homedir neilb (Neil Brown) : huldra/vicepa : /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/n/neilb : free 234.2G (used 48%)
In this case my home directory is on “huldra”.
As I say, nothing should go wrong, and the update will be invisible, we are just being cautious.
Neil
