Updated: June 21st
Even though we can't really have the good old-fashioned annual Factory Fortnight that used to be the norm in 20th century industrial Britain, when all the workers & management took their holidays at the same time in August, leaving factories clear for maintenance staff, fitters, machine tool engineers, painters, etc to move in and carry out an annual re-fit, we are now seriously looking at August as the best time to enjoy(!) a partial shutdown. This is necessary so that we can close down the bulk of the compute cluster that is currently accommodated in the ICT data centre and move it to the Maths server room along with the few remaining private servers still in ICT, ahead of the data centre's eventual closure next year.
You'll find more information on August's partial shutdown here.
Original posting: 23rd March
Finally, we have started planning ahead for the eventual shutdown of the ICT data centre in the City & Guilds building over the next 18-24 months and its migration to a new facility in Slough. We have over 30 servers hosted in ICT - 24 of these are Maths compute cluster nodes which will probably move to Huxley 616 later this year along with a non-rackmount storage server while the rest will move to Slough, with hardware upgrades where necessary to support full remote management including "bare metal" installs, (the ability to install an operating system remotely from media in South Kensington without going anywhere near Slough, for example).
Some private rackmount systems currently in Huxley 616 may have to move to Slough although this is not certain - if it's not possible to install an operating system remotely or if the owner is unwilling to pay for upgrades to allow this to be done, or replace the server with one that has full remote media support, then that server will have to stay in the Maths server room. The main issue with accommodating more systems in the Maths server room is it is not possible to install any more college network connections on Huxley level 6 since the racks in the network wiring cupboard opposite the south lifts are now full. So an influx of another 25 systems into Huxley 616 will potentially be a problem.
For this reason we will have to move nearly all Maths compute cluster nodes onto a private dedicated network which means direct access to a particular node from the college network will no longer be possible although it would still be accessible from a designated head node. This is the norm on HPC clusters and should not inconvenience users that much and it does have the real advantage of faster cluster performance since cluster network traffic will not be mixed with non-compute traffic on the general college network.