Publication from : Darren Moore (darren.moore@stfc.ac.uk)

The tape robotics and a large amount of the hardware behind the Antares tape service at RAL is now 5 years old. We are about to commence a major programme of work to service, replace, and upgrade relevant parts of the hardware. Originally this was planned to take place during the CERN winter shutdown however due to delays in the procurement process outside our control most of the hardware will now be delivered in March.

While much of the work can be carried out transparently or with only minor degradation to the service, it will be necessary to have a complete downtime to work on the robotics for 4 days, from Monday 28th April at 05:00 UTC until Thursday 1st May at 14:00 UTC[1]. We appreciate that this is very close to the planned start of stable beams and therefore wanted to give experiments as much notification as possible, so they have time to plan any necessary mitigating actions. Unfortunately, we do not have any flexibility in the dates.

The overall programme of work includes:

Service / preventive maintenance on the Tape Robot.
Upgrade of the Spectra TFinity Robot to LumOS.
Installation of TS1170 drives and 83PB of additional media.
Installation of additional Tape Servers and Fibre Channel equipment.
Replacement of the EOS buffer front end. These nodes will have IPv6 enabled and also have direct access to the LHCOPN link as well as be on the LHCONE.

If you have any questions about this, please contact your relevant RAL VO contact; Alex Rogovski (LHCb, ALICE), Brij Jashal (ATLAS), Katy Ellis (CMS) or submit a GGUS ticket to RAL-LCG2.

Thank you for your understanding.

Alastair Dewhurst
RAL Tier-1 Manager

[1] https://goc.egi.eu/portal/index.php?Page_Type=Downtime&id=36441

Link to this broadcast.