As part of the standard maintenance cycle, as usual there will be an extended shutdown of Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Services around the second week of December to carry out major maintenance.
This year there are additional major pieces of work to complete which mean more downtime than in previous years:
- Estates need to replace the transformer that failed earlier in the year, causing a widespread outage across BEAR Services and which has left the service exposed to power interruptions.
Estates need to complete critical maintenance on the High Voltage power network on which the Vale depends. This work was scheduled for the summer but had to be postponed following the transformer failure in the data centre– see update below- We (ARC) need to carry out all of our normal annual maintenance tasks on the BEAR infrastructure.
The complexity also means a second outage is likely to be needed early in the New Year.
We will provide actual dates as soon as they are known but in the meantime, please make plans to deal with the outage and particularly for any deadlines you may have that fall in the period from 16 December through to 10 January.
Note that this does not mean that BEAR services will be down from 16 December to 10 January, just that we think this is the period within which the downtimes will occur.
Update 12/11/24 – December dates finalised
Dates for the December maintenance are confirmed as being between 8am on Monday 16 and 8am on Wednesday 18 December. All BEAR Services should be considered at risk, with the following services unavailable between those times:
- BlueBEAR (HPC) including the BEAR Portal – please note that if you request a wall time for a job on BlueBEAR that extends into the maintenance window, then your job will not run
- BEAR Data Transfer (Globus)
- Baskerville (Tier 2 HPC)
Please note that the BEAR Research Data Store will be available during the December maintenance period but at risk due to network changes and Estates work in the data centre.
Unfortunately the Estates High Voltage work planned for December is no longer going ahead due to difficulties in coordinating deliveries, contractors and operations. This essential work will need to be rescheduled and will affect BEAR in the coming year.