The Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) team is committed to enhancing the recoverability and resiliency of all enterprise IT services supported by AITS, including Banner, HR Front End, Research Administration, and the Enterprise Data Warehouse. As part of our on-going disaster recovery program, we perform simulated production failover exercises annually and full failover exercises biannually. These exercises help us ensure that our recovery plans and procedures, failover technology, and recovery objectives are tested and ready to go if needed.
On June 14, 2025 through June 21, 2025, AITS will perform a full failover test of the production data center located in Chicago to the failover data center located in Urbana. The enterprise production systems will run for a week in Urbana under normal workloads and then be transitioned back to Chicago. No loss of data or degradation of services is anticipated with this test and any downtime will fall within the normal outage windows.
Failover Test Schedule
- Start of Test: Services will switch from the Chicago data center to the Urbana failover site between 6:00 AM and 3:00 PM CDT on June 14, 2025. Systems will be unavailable during this time.
- During the Test: Systems will run in Urbana as normal with no anticipated impact to users.
- End of Test: Systems will return from Urbana to the Chicago data center between 1:00 PM and 10:00 PM CDT on June 21, 2025. Systems will be unavailable during this time.
What to Expect
We anticipate that all systems will function normally during the test. Furthermore, users will not have to do anything different to use the systems while they are in Urbana. While we don’t expect major issues, unforeseen disruptions may occur. AITS will actively monitor systems and have resources ready to address any problems. AITS last conducted this test in February 2023.
Additional Information
This test is a critical milestone in ensuring the university’s ability to maintain essential IT services during a disaster. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at aitscommunications@uillinois.edu.