OIT continually manages aspects of the hardware lifecycle, much of this being coordinated by the CAB or Change Approval Board (http://www.oit.umn.edu/change-management/change-approval-board/). Physical hardware has a finite lifespan and eventually passes out of warranty -- and hardware movement occurs within the OIT data centers for a variety of other reasons. End-users are usually oblivious to these ongoing changes (by design).
The network storage mounts used by the https://www.lib.umn.edu and https://hsl.lib.umn.edu Development, Staging and Production servers lived on EOL'ing storage infrastructure being phased out by OIT. Our history on that equipment dates back to groundwork laid between the U Libraries and OIT in February 2009 -- a long run indeed.
We initially migrated the Development and Staging systems to Isilon, but encountered significant issues with Production. It was determined that a 32-bit mode on Isilon needed to be implemented until we upgrade additional infrastructure.
The final move was scheduled for Sunday morning, July 28th, 2013 and entailed coordinating well in advance with OIT, and ensuring that some WebDev staff were available to safely put Drupal into offline mode, shut down several daemons on multiple servers, allow the final data sync to complete, then bring things back online. The process went smoothly, though (ironically) Isilon at-large did experience a glitch the following day and many systems across the University were affected. Storage and network outages are posted on System Status (http://systemstatus.umn.edu/view/Main).
Whether change process, network storage or outages -- the Libraries and OIT infrastructure are increasingly aligned, dependent and coordinated. One immediate advantage is that we can draw on (and contribute toward) a talent pool on the same page.
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