This report – the first in our new style – covers the period from 1st August 2009 to 31st October 2009 inclusive. The executive summary highlights points of particular note but further commentary, including details of other incidents, are included in the attached detailed reports.
This quarter has seen a number of service availability problems at both the EDINA and Mimas datacentres.
At EDINA networking hardware caused the Digimap services (Digimap OS Collections, Historic Digimap, Marine Digimap and Geology Digimap) to be unavailable for 8 hours in August. An error with the authentication system caused further problems overnight for users of these services in October for just over 12 hours; users who were already logged in would have been able to continue their sessions but others would not have been able to log in.
The MasterMap Download service was further affected by degraded performance during September following a database upgrade. EDINA reverted to the previous system whilst awaiting a solution from their supplier.
SUNCAT’s 12-month availability service level continued to be affected by an incident that occurred in January 2009. Since then the service has had 100% availability and it is therefore anticipated that the service level will be met from the next quarter. Whilst it has been noted that overnight backups have adversely affected SUNCAT response times for a long time, for the first time peak-time measured responses were above the service level this quarter.
Services at Mimas, including those components of the ESRC Census Programme hosted there (CIDER, CDU and SARS) were affected by a further period of unavailability in September following similar problems in the two preceding quarters. These problems should be eradicated following transition to new hardware. The transition should also address response times for Zetoc and Intute, the latter of which is reported to have had particularly high usage this quarter.
The number of organisations receiving in excess of 99.7% availability on their connections to JANET has continued to increase and this quarter only 3.2% of sites fell below this level based on calculations over the 12 months ending October 2009. The number of network outages resolved within 10 hours has improved slightly (92%) but is still below the service level of 100%. All connections to external networks were continuously available throughout the quarter; there were no reports of any incidents isolating the core JANET network. The availability service level for the News Reader service has been met this quarter, following incidents in February 2009 and September 2008 that had long-standing effects on this measure.
The Monitoring Unit has been working with BUFVC to collect service performance and usage data from them on a voluntary basis. These data will be incorporated into future quarterly reports.
There is no service level reporting for JISC Advance or JISC Collections. However, usage data for JISCmail (a service within JISC Advance) have continued to be made available to the Monitoring Unit and these have been included in this report.
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Last updated by Ian Cooper on Wednesday, February 10, 2010.
