SWAN Member Libraries,
In addition to an Enterprise upgrade in the upcoming months, SWAN has been working closely with SirsiDynix management to identify and correct the continued Enterprise disruptions we’ve been experiencing.
This unusual rise in service disruptions was noted in November 2016 when there were 11 consecutive overnight outages. These started on November 2nd and concluded on November 10th when the SirsiDynix SaaS (Software as a Service) Team was able to resolve the problem through a series of trial and error relating to an overnight backup process. SWAN IT Manager Steven Schlewitt communicated the outages via SWANcom and summarized on November 11th with the following: http://list.railslibraries.info/pipermail/swancom/2016-November/003687.html
In an unrelated series of disruptions, we experienced Enterprise outages four times in December (December 9, 20, 21, and 27). Now in January, we have already experienced two outages (January 2 and 4). SirsiDynix took steps in the evening of January 4th that should hopefully provide some additional stability by restarting cached system services to free up system memory.
For some background on how Enterprise is managed and monitored, there are two independent sources that oversee the website. First is the SirsiDynix SaaS Team, which hosts the Enterprise web servers, receives alerts to disruptions and takes steps to immediately bring the catalog back online and begin the investigation process. Second is a monitoring service set up by SWAN IT to alert us to any service problems so that they may be either resolved in-house or escalated to SirsiDynix in the instant that they occur, and so the membership can be notified. These two sources monitoring Enterprise allow us to act immediately when a disruption is identified, but it is critical that SWAN and SirsiDynix work proactively to not only reduce the amount of time of outages, but prevent future downtime entirely.
While all of these outages have been limited to under an hour (most last no longer than 10 minutes), SWAN does not view this as an acceptable level of reliability, and so we have escalated these cases to the SirsiDynix Library Relations Manager and will continue to pursue a stable solution for SWAN. In the coming months, we have upgrades of several SirsiDynix services planned, which should not only open up a number of new features, but resolve application bugs relating to several of these outages. We also have confidence that SirsiDynix is making their best effort to thoroughly investigate and resolve these issues for SWAN, as they do not take these outages lightly. SirsiDynix has already escalated the issue to the associated management teams and begun to propose options.
We sincerely apologize for the disruption your libraries and patrons have experienced, and hope this email serves to clarify the steps we are taking to remediate the issue.
As always, thank you for your patience, and stay tuned for further updates via SWANcom.