Message-Id: 202008041000
Time: 13.08.2020, 17:00 – 21:00
Affected: GWDG ESX environment, group drives of the university, student home directories, file areas of the university administration, file areas and parts of the ESX environment of the Max Planck Society Administrative Headquarters, various other services
Impact: None

On Thursday, 13.08.2020, a firmware upgrade will be carried out on the central NetApp mass storage systems of the GWDG during the maintenance window starting at 17:00. These systems are core components of the GWDG mass storage infrastructure on which almost all applications and services depend directly or indirectly. The upgrade aims to improve operational stability, enable necessary new functions and ensure the future supportability of the systems.

The upgrades will be carried out online without interruption of the storage services provided by means of several failovers between the redundant functional units of the systems. They will be mostly transparent for all clients. Increased latencies may occur for a short time when accessing the mass storage. For the users no impairments are to be expected, provided that no unexpected problems occur.