“Because of an upgrade to Purdue’s major file services storage system, faculty, students and staff should close any documents stored online and log out before 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8. The system is expected to be unavailable through the weekend and back in service Monday morning.

If you need to work on something over the weekend, you can move it to off-line or cloud storage and restore it to Purdue’s online storage once it is back in operation. Faculty and staff who do this need to be mindful of Purdue’s policies governing the handling of University data, some of which should not be moved to unsecured external storage.”

Here is some additional detail for your information.

What?

Lifecycle replacement of the Isilon system in conjunction with the migration of Purdue’s main data center from Freehafer Hall, which is scheduled for demolition. The new Isilon system is already installed in the Mathematical Sciences Building and more than 2 petabytes of existing data has been synced to it.

When?

We will complete the migration starting Saturday evening, October 8, disable access to the Isilon system at that time, perform a final sync of data and permissions, update DNS records, re-enable access, and perform validation testing. We expect the process to be completed during the weekend.

Impact?

We do not believe any changes will need to be made to client machines. The weekend of Oct. 8, however, a significant number of campus-wide and campus unit systems that rely on Isilon storage will be unavailable. Prominent examples include personal home directories, many departmental file shares, BoilerBackpack, student organization websites, Video Express rooms, ITaP computer labs and Software Remote.