Planned Outages

Operational Practices: Scheduled Outages
Statement of Procedures and Service Standards v2.2

It is CENIC’s goal not only to maintain high standards of network reliability and availability, but also to assure clear, consistent, and established communications with carriers and other providers.

Purpose: The following describes the procedures and timeframes associated with scheduled network outages.
Scope: The CENIC network consists of the CENIC backbone and the connections from the backbone to Universities, Colleges, and K12 node sites, peer and transit networks, and such connections to legacy networks as may from time to time be established. All CENIC-operated network segments are supported according to the procedures described herein.

In the course of operating networks there are times when it becomes necessary to take a portion of the network down for maintenance or upgrades.

Notifications

Planned outages will be scheduled on business days between the hours of 0000-0600 (completed by 0600). All outages will be announced and all customers notified at least 4 business days in advance through a notification e-mail to ops-announce@lists.cenic.org.

If a planned outage is of an extremely urgent nature, such that it cannot wait 4 business days, a notification is will be sent to ops-announce@lists.cenic.org as soon as possible containing the date and time of the outage.

All planned outages are posted to the CENIC maintenance calendar.

A notification regarding the completion of a scheduled network outage will be sent within 30 minutes following the restoration of service.

Request for Change in Schedule

In the event an outage has been scheduled and the NOC receives one or more communications from sites requesting that the outage be rescheduled, the request will be reviewed with CENIC management to determine whether it is feasible to reschedule the outage.

Reasonable efforts to reschedule the outage will be made and a follow-up email to the client distribution list will be sent. If rescheduling is impossible due to serving the overall health of the network, a follow-up email to the client distribution list will be sent explaining the risks and the necessity for the outage.