IT Services Continues to Investigate Gizmo File Share Issues

IT Services is investigating the cause of intermittent outages to the Gizmo server over the past several weeks. Users are unable to read or write files to or from Gizmo during these recurring outages, usually lasting for 10 minutes or less. The cause of the unexpected input/output pauses has not been determined at this time.

IT Services has been actively pursuing new storage solutions to meet the demands of ever-increasing campus growth over the past year. As the storage requirements for Gizmo as well as other essential services have increased, occasional issues with performance were observed, and a plan to deploy faster, more reliable next generation flash storage was put in place. 

Systems that had outgrown the existing storage environment began to access the new storage last November, reducing the impact on Gizmo. Even with efforts to reduce the load on Gizmo, issues have continued. IT Services is working toward resolving issues in the new storage environment and addressing the reoccurring Gizmo outages. IT Services has engaged all possible resources toward solving these problems, including outside staff augmentation, close collaboration with numerous vendors and close communication between all relevant internal IT Services teams.

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Planned outages are posted at itstatus.uark.edu/calendar. Get outage notifications and updates from IT Services at twitter.com/uaits, facebook.com/uarkITS or its.uark.edu/news.