As part of Blackboard Managed Hosting team's initiative to improve our environment and take advantage of new technologies, they will be undergoing a project to swap out their existing core switches in both the VA2 and VA3 data centers. This swap will enable them to upgrade to their vendor's latest technology switches while expanding their capacity so that they can better support our growth.
The maintenance work is scheduled to happen on Tuesday December 28th from 12:00 - 8:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST).
Why is the maintenance window 8½ hours instead of the usual 4 hours?
This project is larger in scale than most of the maintenance work Blackboard Managed Hosting does during their regular windows. Their standard maintenance generally requires adding or replacing a card or upgrading code whereas this maintenance requires the replacement of both the A & B side switches. While the work itself should not take the full 8½ hours, they have built a buffer into the window to resolve any problems that might arise and/or enact a rollback plan if needed.
Will Online@HCC be offline the entire window?
The Managed Hosting Engineering Teams will take all necessary steps to minimize the impact to our site. However, because the maintenance requires redirecting traffic in addition to physically removing equipment, HCC faculty and students may experience extended periods of latency and/or packet loss at anytime during the entire window. My recommendation is to prepare for the site to be offline for the full eight and a half hours. You may find the site available sporadically but you should not plan to do any work as it may not be saved if the site becomes unreachable.
In other words, please do not log in and do any work on your classes as the work may not be saved.
