Planned Keller Hall Datacenter Power Outage – May 19-22
Facilities Management has scheduled essential building maintenance requiring a building power outage in Keller Hall on the evenings of May 19, 20, and 21, from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM each night.
This planned outage necessitates the complete shutdown of the Keller Hall Datacenter, which will impact various CSE-IT services. To avoid the high risk of system failure associated with powering down and restarting critical equipment multiple times, CSE-IT staff will proactively power down all datacenter equipment (including infrastructure and research machines) before the first outage. Systems will be brought back online after the final night of maintenance
Key Dates and Timeline:
- Datacenter Shutdown:
- Start: 6:00 PM on Tuesday, May 19
- End: Systems back up by 10:00 AM on Friday, May 22
- Instructional and research services will be unavailable during this entire window.
- Building Power Outages (Keller Hall):
- 10:00 PM May 19 – 6:00 AM May 20
- 10:00 PM May 20 – 6:00 AM May 21
- 10:00 PM May 21 – 6:00 AM May 22
The Datacenter shutdown will affect the following services:
- All CSE Labs computers and departmental instructional computers that rely on Datacenter infrastructure
- This includes labs outside of Keller Hall
- Linux home directories
- VOLE
- Certain ECE software tied to Keller infrastructure
- Research Machines that are in the Keller Hall Datacenter
Why now?
This outage is required by Facilities Management to support building-level electrical maintenance. The work cannot be completed without full building power interruption. Originally scheduled for late April, the outage and maintenance were moved to May in order to minimize disruption and impact to students and classes.
Risk Considerations
Multiple full datacenter power cycles increase hardware failure risk. We estimate up to 10% of Keller Hall CSE Lab and departmental lab machines could experience issues after repeated power restoration. Critical infrastructure (storage, firewalls, and networking) will be monitored closely and restored according to our disaster recovery plan.
Communication Plan
- CSE-IT Research Support Team will be reaching out to affected researchers.
- We will send weekly reminders leading up to the outage.
- Notices will be posted on the CSE-IT website, lab login screens, and building displays.
- Immediate updates will be issued if restoration is delayed beyond 10:00 am on May 22nd.