IT maintenance and planned outages

Maintaining Our Digital Environment

IT Maintenance and Planned Outages aim to maintain central IT facilities regularly while minimising interruption to normal business functions and reducing the risk of unintended service disruptions.

Planned Outage dates have been approved for the next two years, 2023 and 2024 by the Senior Executive. Dates of the scheduled maintenance are listed below, whereby details of each outage will be made available as we approach each weekend. ITDS will communicate and remind staff and students about these maintenance periods in advance via University approved communication channels. This schedule also considers vital operations in the University calendar, such as enrolments, teaching, examinations and graduation.

Unless otherwise noted, all regular Planned Outage windows begin at 6:00 pm and conclude the following day at 8:00 am. If there are any exceptions to these times, they will be communicated before the date. Times are in AEST/AEDT.

Please note: Along with regular Maintenance windows for labs, etc., and as within any technology environment, there are unforeseen circumstances whereby ITDS must suspend some services for urgent repairs and patching.

Planned Outages

In addition to urgent updates and repairs, ITDS periodically conducts maintenance at selected weekends to ensure our IT systems run securely and smoothly. The importance of establishing regular maintenance windows during low-impact time periods is crucial for Western, and our digital environment.

Each maintenance weekend is advertised in advance and is conducted at a time negotiated with all stakeholders to ensure minimal disruption.

During the maintenance outage,  staff and students can log on into the MyIT Portal and check the service status to see what is available and what services are impacted.

Scheduled Dates for 2023

Approved Dates/TimeServices Impacted

Saturday 8th & Sunday 9thApril (Easter)

Outage Time: 3:00 am (08/04) to 9:00 am (09/04)

  • Online storage: This will impact all Western-owned computers connected to the University network, including staff laptops, desktop computers, library kiosks, library computers, student labs, teaching computers (both on-site and off-site), desktop files, My Documents files and all staff files.
  • Citrix/VPN remote access for staff and students.

Saturday 8th & Sunday 9thJuly

  • A number of IT applications and services hosted in our Sydney data centres will be offline for a network upgrade.
  • Citrix/VPN remote access for staff and students will be offline.

Saturday 15th & Sunday 16thOctober

TBD

Thursday 21st & Friday 22nd December (End of Year Break)

TBD

Scheduled Dates for 2024

Approved DatesServices Impacted

Saturday 30th & Sunday 31st March (Easter)

TBD

Saturday 22nd & Sunday 23rd June

TBD

Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd September

TBD

Monday 23rd & Tuesday 24th December (End of Year Break)

TBD

Student Computers Maintenance

All ITDS-managed general-purpose (student) computers (located in labs, Library, etc) undergo maintenance from 2 am to 5 am every morning.

Unscheduled Maintenance

From time to time ITDS may need to suspend individual services for urgent and essential repairs, patching, and updates. Such work is scheduled for the least disruptive time possible, and we do our best to inform all stakeholders and users of the impacts of this work when it must occur.

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