Stan Kolasa (OIT) – not an OARC-generated communication
Sunday, January 13, 2019 at 11:59 am

Fellow IT Staff:

As many of you know, OIT Enterprise Messaging manages several legacy systems providing IT services to the university community. Over the years, many of the services provided by these systems are no longer used or needed and have moved to other systems. Enterprise Messaging is planning to decommission these legacy services and systems in 2019, some of them as early as June 1.

This message is intended to provide advance notice about our plans for decommissioning these systems. The ITLC has already been recently informed.
The systems involved are:
RCI: This system is primarily used by faculty and staff. The three major services provided by this system are email, storage and website hosting.
* RCI email: Email services on RCI were already turned off when we migrated to Rutgers Connect.
* RCI storage: Some people still have files/data stored in the accounts on RCI. If anyone still needs those files/data and doesn’t want anything to be erased, they should move it to OneDrive, Google Drive, Box (once it is available to the Rutgers community), or some other local storage. We hope to have all storage (except those dealing with webpages) moved off RCI by June 1 and therefore will be disabling those accounts on RCI. We will be contacting users with active accounts about this service decommissioning.
* RCI website hosting: We are already in the process of contacting users and departments with websites on RCI to see if they are still needed or not. If still needed, they need to be moved elsewhere, such as Sites@Rutgers (a service provided by Enterprise Application Services) or other web-hosting vendors, or they will be decommissioned. The owners of the web sites will need to decide how they want to handle their current web sites on RCI and handle the migration of them if needed We hope to have all websites off of RCI sometime in 2019, depending on the number of active sites.

Eden: This is a system primarily used by students and student organizations. The email services have already been decommissioned. We plan to handle storage and websites on Eden in a similar fashion to RCI and have the storage service decommissioned by June 1 and websites decommissioned sometime in 2019. Notices will be sent to users with active accounts who use the above mentioned services.

Apps.rutgers.edu: This is a special system that is used by about 300-400 faculty/staff for classroom initiatives or for research purposes. Students also use these systems at times as part of course work or working with a researcher. This system handles long-running jobs that have been submitted by the user. The jobs are typically scientific/mathematical type of applications, such as SAS, Maple and others. Luckily, there is a similar—and better—service being offered by Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC). We have already communicated this to the faculty using this system, and we let them know we plan to fully decommission all services and remove all accounts on June 1. More info on OARC and the Amarel Cluster can be found at http://it.rutgers.edu/oarc (see note at the top for “Apps & Sirius Users”).

Once the services on the systems mentioned above are migrated elsewhere, we will be in a position to make sure all accounts on these systems are fully disabled and then turned off. We will disable user accounts for several weeks to ensure we have not missed anyone. Then as part of the final decommissioning of a system, we will remove all of the remaining accounts and turn off the system completely.

We will be sending out targeted communications to end users who still have accounts on the above systems/services. Please note you may get questions from your user community when we send out communications, and they may ask you for assistance in moving off their data.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email kolasa@rutgers.edu .

Thank you for your assistance with the above.

Stan Kolasa
Office of Information Technology – EAS, Enterprise Messaging

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Stan Kolasa
Office of Information Technology – EAS, Enterprise Messaging
Rutgers University
kolasa@rutgers.edu