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 will be needed early in the New Year.
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.
Update 25/11/24 – January dates finalised
Dates for the January maintenance are confirmed as being between 8am on Tuesday 7 and 12pm on Thursday 9 January. As this is when the transformer is being replaced, a full power shutdown is needed, so all BEAR services will be unavailable between those dates and 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 Research Data Store
- BEARCloud VMs
- BEAR GitLab
- BEAR Data Transfer (Globus)
- Baskerville (Tier 2 HPC)
- BEAR hosted websites (including bearadmin and bear-apps)