At 5PM this evening we will be relocating the University's admin server (protea) and the SEALS Millennium system (opac.seals.ac.za) from our Struben data centre to our AMM data centre. This process is likely to take about an hour, and will result in these systems being unavailable for that time. This will affect the university's finance & administrative systems, the meal booking system (mealserver.ru.ac.za) and maintenance requisition system, the shared library online public access catalogue and the library circulation system.
The background to this is that at 22:30 last night, the fire system in our Struben data centre detected smoke and discharged the fire suppression system. The fire suppression system in this facility was a Halon 1301-based, which is now a prohibited substance for environmental reasons. As a result we will need to investigate and install an alternative system. It is likely that we'll be without adequate fire protection in this facility for a few weeks or months.
To mitigate this risk, we're relocating a number of other critical systems to our AMM data centre. This involves removing the servers from their racks in Struben and re-racking them in the AMM facility about 1KM away.