Planned service disruption to the Data Center Firewall service

Between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 11, ITS will perform a network upgrade for the Data Center Firewall (DCFW) that will result in a brief outage (lasting only a few minutes). This upgrade will be followed by a redundancy test and the relocation of DCFW redundant equipment, which will result in a temporary degraded state (lasting about an hour). A full breakdown of the planned work is outlined below:

The primary and redundant University Enterprise Network (UEN) connections for the Data Center Firewall (DCFW) service will be upgraded to full 10 Gbps UEN core connections from the 5Gbps connections in use today. This will provide room for expansion in the near future as more data continues to pass through the Data Center. This portion of the work will commence at 5:00 a.m. and will result in an outage that is only expected to last a few minutes.

After the upgrade is determined to be successful, a redundancy test of the DCFW service will be initiated. This test should last no more than fifteen minutes. The test will consist of disconnecting the redundant half of the DCFW equipment to verify that customer connectivity remains active. The potential for a full outage is possible, but not expected. During this time, users should maintain full service functionality, but the service’s redundancy will not be available.

If the redundancy test proves successful, then the redundant equipment will be physically moved to a new location. During the move the primary equipment will not have redundant equipment to which it can to fail over. This lack of redundancy puts all services behind the DCFW in a degraded state. The DCFW service will remain in a degraded state until the redundant equipment is installed in the new location and all services are verified to be working. This portion of the work will take around one hour and should be completed by 6:30 a.m.

In total, the upgrade will cause a few minutes of no connectivity to servers behind the DCFW. The redundancy test and move will cause a degraded state that is expected to last around one hour.

We will be posting a reminder of this planned upgrade just prior to March 11 and will post an alert as soon as the update has been completed and full service has been restored.

More information: Planned service disruption to the Data Center Firewall service