CSIT has scheduled a maintenance window for updating the firmware of our Fortinet application load balancers.  The maintenance operation will begin on Friday, 8/5, at about 4:00pm.  The operation will continue until the firmware on both load balancers is up to date, but we anticipate that it will take no longer than one hour.

Load balancers, as the name suggests, act as an entry point for client service requests to the systems they monitor.  Requests are distributed between redundant systems in order to improve performance and assure the no single service is overloaded.  As we update firmware on one of our load balancers, the management of incoming client requests will be shifted to the other.  As the updated system reboot to load the new firmware and comes back on line, the other one will be updated.  This will continue until firmware on both devices are up to date.

We do not anticipate downtime for any services managed through the load balancers.  Administrative systems (i.e., Ellucian) are the most used services managed through the load balancers and it is possible that response times may be slower during this process.  Thank you for your patience,