Planning for PURE software and hardware upgrades in 2016 & 2017

Planning mtg on Tues 22-March 2016:

Present : James Toon, Stefan Kaempf, Heather Larnach, Suran Perera, Mark Lang, David Watters, Jamie Thin, Billy Wardrop (UWP team) 

Agenda:

Priority and Scheduling of the PURE work for the next 12 months

Impact on PURE API , and new 'Changes endpoint' functionality as available in the current version of PURE

Brief notes and Actions:

Stefan called the meeting to make sure the the LIVE production version will still be on a supportable version of Oracle from Oct 2016. Atira drop support for Oracle 11g from Oct 2016 , so IS Apps will need to upgrade PURE to Oracle 12c by Oct 2016.

Stefan noted:

"There is the database to move to 12c, the Application upgrade as well as the application server reaching end of life. We have two projects for 16/17, but with ATIRA no longer supporting 11g db from October on I suggest some of this work is moved into this financial year."

Infrastructure upgrades are dealt with under the project route by default.

There are 5 core funded PURE projects above the Red line   for 16/17:

see

https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/planning/programme/res/16-17

Core funded proposals

200d budget for 16/17 - for various PURE upgrades

50d budget for  17/18 - for upgrade to Oracle 12c ( which will need to be brought forward) - another PURE project may then need to bump back into 17/18 to make space - unless all planned activity can be delivered within the 200d effort allocated for 2016/17

Status of Hardware:

Physical Hardware - App tier - end of Life (Action required now) 

Physical Hardware - DB tier - already upgraded to new DB Platform (OK) 

Priority Order:

Oracle 12 c

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Tasks

1) July 2016 - INF105 will move existing LIVE PURE App server to main machine room and extend warranty for one year ( £500) - this will buy us 12 months breathing space - before replacing the old physical server with a new physical server or a VM  if Atira being to start supporting Virtual servers /  VM (currently Atira say customers can use a VM at their own risk) 

2) Oct 2016 - RES project will upgrade PURE from Oracle 11g to Oracle 12c ( 50 days effort in plan - this won't all be needed so some days can cover some of the other required PURE work)

3) Upgrade PURE Project model

4) Upgrade PURE Application to new version with Java and Tomcat upgrades and build on new VM or Physical machines, so that old App tier can be retired

5) Complete RES057 Worktribe to PURE data feed

Items 3) and 4) could be swapped round depending on priorities / Atira release schedule and resources in the business area - upgrade to new PURE project model will require a lot of effort from James Toon - also potential impact on downstream consumers of the API and other interfaces.

Notes on API:

UWP team and Billy Wardrop are building a data hub to make it easier to present data to the Drupel web editors in the Schools.

The current data feed can only pull approx 25% of the PURE data each night , so it pulls it down in chunks over 4 nights - this is vulnerable to data feed failures , as each time it fails you have to start afresh - it can't be restarted from the last successful record.

The data has been out of date since failing in Jan 2016, only recently updated with a new snapshot as of 15-March by  21-March .

Billy Wardrop would like to see an improved and more robust data feed from the PURE API.

Either move to change based feed over 3 to 6 months - this functionality is already available int eh production version of PURE, and / or remove contraints on the API pull , so that the UWP process can run in the background through the day.

The API runs via the App tier - so it is unlikely that the API can be pointed at the secondary instance on the new DB tier ( that would be one solution to move the load from the primary instance) 

Alternatively when the Apptier is upgraded there is unlikely to be any performance bottlnecj - so the contraints on when the UWP API process is run could be lifted.

Ricky has a set of scripts that were used in RES037 or RES041 to load test the performance of the API, these could be re-run on the current infrastructure to see if the UWP process does have a performance hit on the LIVE production service.

ACTIONS:

Jamie Thin to initiate the new project to upgrade PURE to Oracle 12c &  allocate PM

David Watters to schedule the PURE App server move as part of INF105 ( and agree planned downtime with James Toon & Suran Perera) 

Jamie Thin to start some outline planning for the other PURE projects and initiate / schedule the project work for items 3) , 4) and 5) above

Note : Jamie Thin and James Toon have limited availablity until after the RES058 project completes the full-rollout of the new Worktribe Research Management system w/c 18-April 2016