Service Boundaries & Support

Service Boundaries

LocalTime solutions leverage existing capabilities and expertise. They allow Local IT people to focus on the contents of their organisation’s virtual machine images and managing their execution. Leverage of Intersect shared infrastructure and skills reduce both initial setup time and ongoing management effort.

Local eResearch support people are able to concentrate resources on researcher requirements, research project workflows, and data pipeline management. Training costs are reduced through use of a standard platform that researchers are already familiar with.

Inclusions

Intersect provides second level remote support services for all core software. This includes:

• Escalation and management of incidents and problems that cannot be resolved by Local IT first level support.
• Management of the Openstack Platform including cell and zone configuration.
• Configuring, patching, upgrading, and troubleshooting of the OpenStack Platform, including security incident response.
• Configuring, patching, upgrading and troubleshooting the host operating systems
• Access to Nectar supported virtual machine images
• Access to Launchpod deployment service
• Monthly usage accounting and dissection
• Add or remove compute nodes (hardware changes must be prescheduled)

Options

Optional services can be negotiated on top of standard LocalTime subscription fees:

• Local Cinder Volume, Swift Object Storage and Space.intersect.org.au services are extremely site-specific and must be negotiated individually.
• Training services are available through Learn.intersect.org.au courseware and trainers, generally requiring tailoring to organisational preferences.

Exclusions

The following services are generally excluded from LocalTime as they are typically performed by Local IT, however Energy.intersect.org.au consulting services are available and negotiable depending on organisational requirements:

• Hands-on deployment, management or maintenance of locally owned hardware,
• Hands-on deployment, management or maintenance of virtual machine instances and Guest operating systems.
• Hands-on deployment, management, configuration and maintenance of end-user Nectar tools and virtual laboratories.
• Managing and maintaining Nectar Community unsupported virtual machine images.
• Customization or modification of OpenStack software packages to site-specific needs.
• Installation and support of non-standard software like drivers, hypervisors, host OSes that do not form part of the Nectar or OwnTime supported platforms.

Support Arrangements

The Intersect Operations Team provides level 2 support to Local IT Services for OpenStack platform and core software. Standard business support hours are 9am-5pm Monday to Friday, except public holidays.

Process by which issues are raised

Local IT can report an issue by logging an incident at help.intersect.org.au or by sending an email to help@intersect.org.au. This is a simple and fast entry point to our help.intersect.org.au portal.

Process by which issues are resolved

An Intersect support engineer will provide an initial response to Local IT, which may also involve contacting a representative at the Nectar Distributed Helpdesk to initiate triage.

Subsequently, Intersect will provide a second response to Local IT that includes working with them to establish the following:

• Confirm that we understand the problem and can reproduce it.
• If the solution is immediately obvious, then a plan will be created outlining how the problem can be fixed, including what needs to be done to implement it.
• If the solution is not immediately obvious, an estimate of the time needed to investigate will be given.

An Intersect support engineer will then work through the issue, providing regular updates to Local IT. If the issue is related to core services function, Intersect Support Engineer will escalate the incident to the Nectar core services team.

Where the problem requires an upgrade or outage, a plan will be formed in conjunction with Local IT. This will ensure that disruption is minimized and risks have been mitigated.

Maintenance and upgrades are managed in a coordinated manner with Nectar Core Services and the other Nectar Nodes. Upgrades are performed on an approximate six monthly cycle, usually about 3-4 months behind the upstream Openstack releases. Intersect Operations will advise the schedule of planned upgrades.