Campus Computer Systems Planned Maintenance Schedule
| Planned Computer System Downtimes for Summer/Fall 2009 |
|---|
| July 20th, 2009, 5:00 p.m. to midnight |
| August 24th, 2009, 5:00 p.m. to midnight |
| October 12th, 2009, 5:00 p.m. to midnight |
| November 23rd, 2009, 5:00 p.m. to midnight |
Why are computer maintenance schedules when they are?
Inevitably, every computer downtime has a negative impact on some member of the Kenyon community, and we are often asked why we happened to pick just that very day and time to cause such inconvenience. But downtimes are still necessary, and we really do try to schedule our maintenance outages to minimize the negative impact, using these guidelines:
First and foremost, we want to minimize the impact on the academic endeavor, so we never schedule a downtime during the active academic year. Academic work takes place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so even Sunday at 2:00 a.m.during the semester may be a bad time for someone (especially the someone who has a paper due Monday morning.) Thus, we schedule all maintenance during breaks. And while we do recognize that academic work also takes place during breaks, we expect that such work is more amenable to rescheduling, given prior notice.
Second, we want to minimize the impact on the administrative work of the College, so we never schedule a downtime during normal working hours--even during breaks. We assume an inviolable window of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., which is half an hour wider than the normal 8:30-4:30 work day. And while we do recognize that administrative work also takes place other times of the day, we expect that such work is more amenable to rescheduling, given prior notice.
Third, we schedule our maintenance on week days instead of week ends because--in the case of some horrible disaster--we may need external vendor support as soon as possible, which usually is available the next business day. So a downtime on Friday or Saturday evening could result in a situation in which we couldn't get help until Monday morning.
Fourth, we don't schedule maintenance on Sunday night because we don't want to risk problems on Monday morning, when more business gets done than on any other day.
Fifth, we don't schedule maintenance between midnight and 8:00 a.m. unless we absolutely must, because that is when most of the computer backup operations take place and we don't want to interrupt them.
That is why our maintenance windows are--in general--after 5:00 p.m. on Monday-Thursday evenings during breaks only.