A note from Jeremy Graham, Manager, Learning Systems Operations

“Hi All. I don’t know whether it’s common knowledge that we’ll be adding a considerable amount of new storage to the Portal infrastructure over the course of the summer. This is driven by a few things, primary among which, of course, is that user content on the system continues to grow by leaps and bounds. In fact, we’re currently at about 95% of capacity on the storage we currently have available for this purpose, which makes matters a little urgent.

In addition, we haven’t historically had enough storage to allow us to make our testing and disaster recovery replicas be complete copies. The new storage will now let us operate multiple replicas of the entire system.

However, integrating the new storage is going to require a lot of work, and will lead to some unavoidable downtime. Fortunately we can roll any outages into the regular Friday night 6:00 – 8:00 window. So the main point of this note is to flag that you should expect scheduled downtime on Friday nights for the next several weeks, starting this week. We will of course continue to announce the outages on a weekly basis, specifically on the Systems Status <http://www.systemstatus.utoronto.ca/> blog.

Best,
Jeremy