RCC will be hard at work over the holiday season replacing ageing data storage platforms with the latest technology to create a bigger, better, faster service for UQ researchers.
Data collections (known as Q collections) will be inaccessible between 5pm (AEST), Thursday, 24 December 2020, to 9am (AEST), Monday, 4 January 2021, while the changeover takes place. This includes the sharing of data collections to any RCC-supported compute service, both cloud compute and any of the high-performance compute clusters. However, all compute services will remain operational during this period even though users cannot access collections
Multiple notifications have been sent to users to inform them of the shutdown and to assure them their data will remain safe.
The new storage platform will provide more flexibility on what back-end storage systems can be used and will remove many capacity constraints. It will also integrate more seamlessly with the MeDiCI data fabric, particularly around knowing if files are offline.
This upgrade will complement further investment in new storage platforms that RCC has planned for 2021.
The bulk of the work will take place at the highly secure Polaris Data Centre in Springfield, where the storage hardware is housed.
The team will work closely with the technology vendor throughout the installation process.
While the upgrade takes place, all access to Q data collections will be disabled. This includes:
- SSH/SFTP/SCP to data via data.qriscloud.org
- NFS access to data on Virtual Machines running on QRIScloud
- Q Collections on the Awoonga, FlashLite, Tinaroo and Wiener high-performance compute clusters.