Data Center Failover Testing

Unfortunately, we are unable to predict this. If everything is working as planned, there should be no outage experienced. However, the reason for testing is to find the potential errors that may exist and correct those to prevent a future outage. Those will not be known until the test starts. 

While we try to coordinate testing during non-business hours, we understand you may need to work outside of normal hours. If that is the case, please download your files to your desktop and plan to work offline. Once the test is complete, you can upload your files back to the university-approved file storage system (Isilon, H: Drive, OneDrive) you regularly keep them. 

There is a good possibility that an outage to some services may occur during testing. For this reason, all data center failover tests will occur outside of business hours on dates that are coordinated with university schools, colleges and operations to be the least disruptive. 

No. Whenever the university data centers undergo a planned failover test, no equipment is actually turned off. An outage is simulated to force the systems to behave as if servers were turned off, but nothing will actually be shut down. This allows us to easily rollback the simulation in the event something doesn't failover correctly and promptly restore service. 

Failover testing is important to ensure that systems are functioning as expected so that they will switch over correctly in the event of an outage. 

Testing failover capabilities will occasionally reveal areas where redundancies were missed, connections got disrupted, or other possible errors that could contribute to the system not failing over properly and a loss of service. 

When a system experiences an outage, redundancies have been put in place so that crucial technology services switch over to a standby system in another data center to ensure the service stays operational for users. 

For example, if the system that supports the CU portal has an outage, it will failover (switch to a standby system) to the other university data center to ensure you can still log in and access the CU portal system. 

When a failover works properly, users will only notice a brief disruption in service as it switches to the other data center.