[Its-colocation-customers] Power Outage in Sliger Data Center from April 29 - May 4

[Mitch Gans]

Power Outage in Sliger Data Center from April 29 - May 4

As part of the ongoing Sliger Renovation, the contractor (Arbitron-Williams) will be working on the data center's electrical and HVAC systems over the first weekend in May. Everything hosted in the Sliger Data Center will have to be shut off before that happens, including all RCC systems. Your department has equipment in the Sliger Data Center and the power outage will affect your systems. We've already reached out to most affected departments, but want to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

RCC staff will contact you in the coming weeks to determine what your specific power needs are and to work out a schedule for either shutting off your systems or transferring them over to temporary power via a generator.

While temporary generator-supplied power is an option for mission-critical systems, we strongly urge you to consider shutting off non-critical servers. There will be no redundancy in power with UPS backups and no redundant cooling. Running systems on temporary power will be done at your own risk. If you choose to shut off your systems for the outage duration, we will provide protective coverings for your systems or racks to protect them from dust and other construction artifacts.

Whether you choose for your systems to remain on temporary power or not, a technician from your department will most likely need to be on-site at the Sliger data center both before and after the maintenance.

The schedule will be as follows:


*         Thursday, April 29; 8am - Temporary power generator online; RCC staff on-site to assist departments in transferring their systems onto the generator

*         Friday, April 30; 8am - 5pm - RCC staff on-site all day to assist departments with a strict deadline of 5pm to complete the work

*         Tuesday, May 4; 12pm - Power and HVAC restored and running

*         Tuesday, May 4; 1pm - RCC staff on-site all afternoon to assist departments with switching equipment back to permanent power

*         Wednesday, May 5; 8am - 5pm - RCC staff on-site all day to assist departments transition remaining equipment back to permanent power

These are the best estimates we can provide at this time, and they may be subject to change between now and when the maintenance occurs. The RCC will make every effort to communicate schedule changes as soon as we are aware of them in our newsletter, on our website, and our systems notice list.

What's being done

The reason for this power outage is to complete necessary upgrades to power and cooling infrastructure as part of the larger Sliger Renovation scheduled to complete in August, 2021. The Sliger Building is a few decades old, and FSU has committed two million dollars to bring the infrastructure to bring it up-to-code.

While most of the improvements will be behind-the-scenes, there are a few notable upgrades:

*         enhanced power and cooling infrastructure to support RCC systems and colocation customers;

*         dedicated 10GbE switch for each rack, to decrease network bottlenecks; and,

*         replacement of original fire suppression system.

For questions, please reach out to us

You can contact us at support at rcc.fsu.edu<mailto:support at rcc.fsu.edu>.


Mitch Gans
Florida State University
2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2760
mgans at fsu.edu<mailto:mgans at fsu.edu>
Office: (850) 644-8555
Cell: (850) 591-6193
Fax: (850) 644-8722

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