JASMIN status updates and reminder of planned maintenance Tuesday 6 July

Dear all,

See below for an update on various aspects of JASMIN services and dates for your diary. Note that these updates are also available on the website news section: https://www.ceda.ac.uk/blog/

Contents:

1. Reminder: scheduled maintenance Tuesday 6th July
2. New disk storage capacity: coming soon
3. Update on Elastic Tape service
4. Update on data transfer issue

1) Reminder: Scheduled maintenance Tuesday 6th July 2021
Scheduled maintenance is planned for Tuesday 6th July 2021, which will cause some disruption to JASMIN and CEDA services. Systems will be “at risk” and users should expect many essential services (including compute and storage) to be unavailable for all or part of the day. Please plan your work to avoid using JASMIN on this day.

On a regular (roughly quarterly) basis, important updates are applied to systems within the JASMIN infrastructure (which also hosts the CEDA Archive and associated services) in order to keep them up to date and secure. Servers may need to be rebooted in order for these changes to take effect, so there may be an interruption to JASMIN and CEDA services on this date. Other system work is also scheduled for this date in order to minimise disruption.

The LOTUS batch processing cluster will be unavailable for the duration of the work on the day, to avoid running jobs being adversely affected. A reservation will start at 06:00 on the day, but any job submitted before that with a running time that goes over the reservation period will not start until after the reservation has finished.

2) New disk storage capacity: coming soon
Much of the new disk storage purchased at the end of last year has now been delivered and the Scientific Computing Department team has been working hard with the relevant vendors to get this new hardware installed, tested and made operational. This has taken longer than planned for various reasons, but we now anticipate the first new storage coming online in July. Further updates about other benefits brought by the Phase 7 upgrade will follow in due course.

3) Update on Elastic Tape Service
Since earlier this year, the Elastic Tape service has been out of action to most users, for reasons mentioned in our previous update. Extensive testing and reconfiguration of relevant systems has enabled us to invite selected users to test the system with us over the past few weeks, which has been successful.

Meanwhile, essential updates to the system to work with an updated operating system are also being applied, requiring further testing, which has also now completed successfully. We are taking this opportunity to apply this update before the return to service to avoid the need for further interruptions in the near future. If all goes as planned, we anticipate that the Elastic Tape service (including command line clients and use via JDMA) should be generally available again from Wednesday 7th July 2021, the day after the planned maintenance mentioned above. Please look out for further announcements and accept our sincere apologies for the unavailability of this service for what we appreciate has been a significant time.

4) Update on data transfer issue
An issue has been affecting some data transfer methods (for example Globus Online) for several months. The JASMIN team is still investigating the cause and how to address it, but our current advice is summarised in this article.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by these issues.

JASMIN Team