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Each Thursday, from 07:00-08:00.
These hours are not explicitly announced. They are defined to make outages predictable and expected for our users, so the non-availability of services can be dealt with constructively beforehand.
Use Calendar
Add the regular maintenance interval to your calendar, as a recurring event, with a 15 minute advance notification.
In addition, it can be expected, that a system has to be put into irregular maintenance twice a year for four hours.
Irregular maintenance will be announced.
Systems fail spontaneously and have to be repaired. The usual service contract with vendors is next business day on site support. In exceptional circumstances, incidents happen on fridays or a first fix is not successful. 48 hours for incident response per year should be taken into account.
During maintenance hours, server operation is unreliable. You should expect unavailable servers and sudden downtimes of services. During the rest of the day, performance may be degraded due to continuing background processes.
Here are examples of incidents around the world which underline the importance of having up-to date systems:
The various file servers, addressed as e.g. \\admin01\..., \\admin02\..., \\faculty01\..., \\faculty02\..., etc., sometimes mapped as P: drive in Windows clients, will become unavailable. The workaround is to copy the file(s) to be manipulated to a local hard disk, edit the file(s) locally, and copy them back after the maintenance hour.
Or, if the files have been open from the file server before the server became unavailable, either wait until the server is back online and continue as if nothing happened, or use the "File -> Save As..." dialogue for creating a local copy and move that to the file server after it is online again.
Jacobs University print services are also run by Windows servers and experience the same effect. Locally attached desktop printers can be used as a workaround. Admin users can use the faculty print server during downtime of admin servers.
If logging in throws a message due to an inaccessible roaming profile, one can still log on with a local profile. Changes to documents within the local profile will not be synchronized to the roaming profile server until next logon with connection to the server.
Outlook clients will loose its connection to the admin Exchange groupware server for Admin Email. After a timeout, Outlook can be used in offline mode operating on the information stored locally, including calendar, contacts and emails. Emails can still be searched and, and new emails written which will be stored in a client-local Outbox, until the Exchange server is back online.
After Outlook having lost connection to the Exchange server, it is advisable to close Outlook and start it anew after the Exchange server became available again to circumvent reconnection issues with some Outlook versions. Also make sure, that the "Online" mode indication in the lower right edge of the Outlook window appears.
For non-admin emails, the web interface of Jacobs University Email can be used.
Workarounds depend on the application and server. Please negotiate a Service Level Agreement for the server. Existing SLAs can be seen at All SLAs.
There is no real workaround except copying information locally and removing it afterwards. On the bright side, outages are usually very short and rather seldom.
Please see the attached Excel spreadsheet for the calculation.
Target |
Availability per year |
---|---|
24/7 |
98,74% |
Business Hours |
25,96% |
Business hours are assumed to be 8am to 6pm Mon to Fri for this calculation, minus "Betriebsurlaub" of estimated 2.5 days per year.