The State IT Agency (Sita) is planning a three-day maintenance and upgrade project this weekend that could impact some government services.
The agency said in a statement on Thursday that it plans to take advantage of the long weekend to do maintenance and upgrade the electrical infrastructure at its data centre in Centurion in Pretoria. The work will begin at 4pm on Thursday and conclude sometime on Sunday, it said.
“This planned intervention targets the long weekend where disruption to services can be minimised and forms part of Sita’s investment and commitment to enhance service delivery capability of government,” the agency said in the statement.
“The upgrade will focus on the UPS output, which will enable continuous distribution of electricity directed especially at critical installations at the facility,” it added.
The upgrades will ensure greater reliability of the services provided by government agencies from the Centurion data centre, it said.
“The infrastructure upgrade forms part of the plans to build more redundancy and will remove the single point of failure in our UPS [backup system] and establish an additional power supply path with physically separated electrical distribution boards.
“This will also help to maintain a high level of power supply reliability for critical computer environments,” Sita said.
Full restoration of all services is expected by 11pm on Sunday, barring any unforeseen developments.
On standby
“The technical support teams will be on standby to assist with any issues that may arise during the service restoration process. The installation activities are designed to allow for a gradual restoration of power supply, ensuring that each distribution board is installed and tested, and all relevant electrical cables are reconnected.”
Sita said it has consulted with all impacted government departments “for concurrence and coordination” as the upgrades “may result in temporary unavailability and delays in dispensing services”. The relevant government departments “will communicate special arrangements put in place for the duration of the downtime”, the agency said.
Sita’s Centurion data centre hosts 16 key services that include government applications such as Logis (a logistics management tool) and BAS (a major accounting system used by the public sector). “Sita apologises to all stakeholders who are adversely impacted by the maintenance due to be undertaken.” — © 2024 NewsCentral Media
