Primo MT EU Data Center February 16-18 2015

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Primo service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on February 16 and 17 and 18, 2015.

The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Europe Data Center during the following hours: 

February 16, 2015 from 13:00 until 21:00 Central European Time (CET).
February 17, 2015 from 10:35 until 17:00 CET.
February 18, 2015 from 10:35 until 11:40 CET.

During the event, the service was unavailable for customers on the European Multi Tenant environment or extremely slow.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

The datacenter suffered a storage problem which led to a degradation in services experienced as extreme slowness or a complete service unavailability.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

• Non-production instances were disabled to allow production systems to receive the required storage resources.
• Offload of the storage: Several instances have been offloaded to a different storage component. We are continuing to offload systems on a daily basis during non-working hours. This activity will complete by March 3rd.
• Consultation with third-party storage vendor: We are consulting with the third-party vendor throughout our procedures to resolve the service disruptions.
• We are carrying out close monitoring of storage at the datacenter.
  Expansion of storage capabilities using new technology, designed to improve the response time of Primo: Expected March 2015.
• Intensive monitoring: In view of the recent service disruptions, monitoring systems have been enhanced with additional tools that allow us to more easily identify the cause of problems.

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/