Two-week offline period for all JASMIN and CEDA services in October

Posted on August 3, 2023  (Last modified on October 19, 2023) • 3 min read • 638 words

We have recently been informed that due to essential maintenance work on the building power supply, we will need to take JASMIN (and therefore all services reliant on the infrastructure) completely offline for a period of up to two weeks from 23rd October 2023.

We wanted to share this information with our user community and stakeholders as soon as practicable – to allow for as much time as possible for people to plan around the disruption.

We know this will cause issues for many people. The overview below provides further details about what we know so far, what we are planning to do, and what you need to do. We will be using this as an opportunity to review, and where possible improve, resilience of our key services.

Please make yourself aware of the implications, engage with us when necessary and share widely with your peers.

Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Phil Kershaw, Head of the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) Adrian Hines, Director of JASMIN

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Headline message:  

JASMIN will be affected by essential work to check and recertify power supply equipment. This work is planned for the weekend of 28th and 29th October 2023, and will require the system to be shut down and restarted in a controlled manner. Hence, we anticipate an outage of up to two weeks, commencing Monday 23rd October.

The undertaking and timing of the power supply work is outside of our control as it is being managed by our host institute (STFC) and impacts all other tenants located in the building.

We would like to gather information to help us understand where significant impacts will be seen as a result of the outage. We particularly need to know where the outage may have a critical impact on delivery of your work.

We will be preparing a mitigation plan to reduce the impact on critical activities where possible, although our ability to act will be limited, and our primary focus will be on the safe shutdown and restart of the system. Please note, therefore, that for many services there will be little we can do to reduce the impacts. Gathering information means we can report on the anticipated impact, but it does not guarantee that we will be able to change anything.  

Our plan:  

The outage means that many CEDA and JASMIN services will be unavailable.

The mitigation plan will include:  

• looking at moving our websites to an external server or public cloud
• identifying and implementing mitigation actions for priority services/projects that will be severely impacted

We are also creating a detailed communication plan to ensure we continue to efficiently share information with relevant stakeholders as we receive it. This includes:

• improving how we report the status of our services. A new status page where all future information will be updated has been created
• creating a new general mailing list – further details coming soon
• gather feedback from users about priority projects/services that will be severely impacted

What you need to do:  

Stay up to date by:

• check our new status page for updates: https://www.ceda.ac.uk/status/

• follow us on Twitter: @cedanews

• signing up to our new mailing list for CEDA users (when available)

• JASMIN users mailing list will be updated as appropriate

Spread the word:

• Tell your colleagues to be aware of this and how they can stay up to date

Be kind and considerate to our staff:

• Remember that we are a small team running many diverse and complex services. We will be doing our best in a difficult situation.

We know this is not an ideal situation. However, it is part of the risk associated with using a research infrastructure. We are not a 24/7 service provider. We can only apologise for the inevitable inconvenience and do our best to keep everyone informed of the situation.