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Thank you again for your participation in the recent surveys, and for your continued patience. We apologize for the confusion and concern we have created in the community announcing the retirement of Socrates and Arachne. We were naïve in our assumptions about the options available to campus, and learned from our survey that our current offerings will not meet the needs of all Socrates and Arachne users. We appreciate your feedback and are actively pursuing options to meet the requirements you identified in the surveys and at the forums, including evaluating non-campus vendors. With that in mind, we want you to know that we will not close either the Socrates or Arachne services until we have more robust and affordable solutions available.
We will be revising the timetable for the retirement of Socrates and Arachne and will communicate with you when we have a new timeframe in place. However, it is clear that it will take at least until the end of this calendar year before we can retire these services and move you to suitable new services.
We have revised the timelines for the Socrates and Arachne services. The revised timeline for the retirement of Socrates is the end of the fall 2008 semester. We expect to retire Arachne at the end of September 2008. We are continuing to explore external options with outside vendors for no or low cost solutions. More information will be provided once it becomes available.
We have collected survey responses for both Socrates and Arachne. We are analyzing the individual responses in order to determine which existing IST web hosting services best meet customer requirements. Survey results are available at the links below:
The winners of the iPod Shuffles are:
Arachne - Kim Steinbacher
Socrates - Robert (Bob) Knapp
Last fall, IST announced that the Socrates and Arachne services currently being delivered to the campus will be retired, with a target date of June 2008. This site provides the latest information on the planned transition and we encourage the campus to provide further feedback. We have completed the planning phase and have outlined the proposed approach below. Due to scope of work and potential impact to some campus clients, the retirement of Socrates will be delayed beyond the previously-announced date of June 2008. We are working on a timeline for Socrates based on survey responses. We are considering the number of people affected and the impact. We anticipate the timeline for Socrates to be late fall 2008. However, we do expect to retire Arachne on schedule.
Socrates provides general purpose Unix services whereas Arachne provides administrative and academic web hosting services. Over the years, Socrates, in particular, has become a "catch-all" with services of all sorts, including file sharing, being supported there. The infrastructure that supports these services is aging, and is experiencing increased unplanned downtime. Despite heroic efforts by our technical teams, the stability of these servers and the resources housed on them, remain at risk and should be retired before experiencing long term outages. As a result of changes in technology and service delivery during the past few years, we do not plan to replace Socrates and Arachne with identical services. Our approach is to move our clients to new services that are appropriate for their technical needs. Moving these clients to a standardized service model will enable IST to provide higher performance levels and redundancy thus avoiding hardware failure and unplanned downtime.
During the fall, an IST team evaluated the status of Socrates and Arachne and identified how these services are currently being used. This group provided recommendations as to which services our clients can move to, and also identified gaps where our clients' needs are not be met by current IST or other campus offerings. The report was submitted to Helen Norris, Director, IST-Client Services, with several recommendations. IST will adopt some of the recommendations in the report, but not all. While the report was intended to be an internal "thought" document, IST is making it available to the campus at the link below.
Socrates and Arachne Report [PDF]
The report recommends that a project manager be identified to oversee the project of abating Socrates and Arachne servers and moving of clients of these services to new ones. IST has determined that this, in fact, consists of seven projects, as outlined below. Due to the strategic nature of the overall program, Helen Norris will serve as the overall program director for these projects.
The projects are:
In addition, we have appointed Tanya Leigh Jansen as the overall communication lead for the program. Tanya will provide regular updates to Socrates and Arachne clients and the campus. The most current information will be available at:
http://ist.berkeley.edu/services/tam/serverabatement.html
The project team will be working through February to determine an exact timeline for each project. We expect to have specific dates and timelines published at the above website by the end of February. Due to the complexity of these projects, it is unlikely that Socrates will be decommissioned by the end of June 2008. However, we expect Arachne to be retired by the end of June 2008. Please note that we will no longer accept new accounts on Socrates and Arachne.
Many Socrates clients and some Arachne clients currently receive their services with no charge. These clients may be asked to move to a service where some or all of the cost is borne by the user, in the form of recharge. This is due to a number of issues. First, services have changed over the years since Socrates and Arachne were introduced. What could previously be done with little customization at very low cost is now more complex requiring additional investment to minimize security risk, manage and protect larger data sets, and provide higher availability and uptime than originally designed for. No additional resources are available from central campus to fund these increased requirements and support costs.
While we do not know all the costs that clients will be asked to bear, those that have been confirmed are identified below. Many clients have asked if some or all of the costs can be waived. IST management has reviewed the available resources and needs to evaluate what can be done for all clients equally once the final costs are known. We will apply whatever subsidy or assistance to all customers equally. The specific resources and costs will be determined as we move forward with the projects, and we can expect this decision to be made this spring. Although some of the current Socrates and Arachne clients will move to services that are without cost to them, others will be migrated to more appropriate services which may be recharge funded.
Customers moving to free services:
Customers moving to recharge services:
Unknown:
We will be working with customers through the spring semester to determine expected costs for the next fiscal year.
We will continue to update the campus throughout the duration of these projects and will be working directly with customers to move them to standardized IST service offerings. We will also provide a more concrete timeline and detailed costs. The most up to date information will be available at:
http://ist.berkeley.edu/services/tam/serverabatement.html
IST has put together a Steering Committee to oversee this project, comprised of customers of the current services and other campus constituents. Committee members are listed below:
We are still actively seeking faculty representation. If you would like to participate, please contact Helen Norris,