Message-Id: 201909051000
Period: 12.09.2019, 17:00 clock – 19:00 clock
Affected: GWDG ESX environment, student home directories, network drives of the university administration, network drives and parts of the ESX environment of the administrative headquarters of Max Planck Society, various other services
Impact: None if everything goes according to plan

Due to the failure of one side of the NetApp MetroCluster storage system due to a bug during the firmware upgrade of the NetApp Filer environment on 15.8., the firmware upgrade for this core system could not be completed at this time. This firmware upgrade is now scheduled for the maintenance window on Thursday, 12.09.

The bug that caused the outage of the system has been identified in close collaboration with NetApp and our service provider and the recurrence during the upgrade can now be ruled out by a validation script. The announced firmware upgrade will eliminate among various other potential stability issues also this bug, which can occur in different circumstances.

The firmware upgrade of the two sides of the NetApp MetroCluster will be performed online without any service interruption by means of several failovers between the redundant functional units of the systems. During the multiple failovers there might be increased latencies when accessing the storage systems for a short time. Although there is always some risk, we assume that there will be no impact on our users.