10/24 followup
This weekend, we executed the generator cutover that has been in planning since May. Everything in the WBOB data center had to be shut off starting at 7:00am for the team of electricians to do their work, and it was an all-day job. Since we were expecting to be offline for so long, we also built into the schedule a Disaster Recovery test of PeopleSoft, using our alternate facilities.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated in either of these activities, particularly the Systems Administration team and Storage team - both teams worked during the wee hours of Saturday and Sunday to do the shutdown and startup. Also the Production Services team, which managed the scheduling and monitoring tasks for the weekend. But everyone put in a great deal of effort in planning and preparing for this outage and DR test.
And it showed. We reported to OIT senior management that the test was a success. On Saturday, AAS was able to validate the technical availability of the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions / HR and Financial Systems. Autosys, a secondary objective supporting automated job scheduling was unsuccessful but a resolution of the problem has been identified.
In addition, we helped other OIT teams and certain customers to fail over their systems to alternate facilities, so they could remain up throughout the weekend: Library's Aleph and SFX, WebVista, Moodle, MyU. This was an important job for OIT, as it meant minimizing the impact to the University during the data center outage. Thank you!