After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the demand for virtual machines by URAN’s user organisations, the Ukrainian NREN, grew exponentially driven by the need to prevent data loss from the possible destruction of the physical infrastructure. Numerous universities were able to take advantage of the free cloud services offered by URAN, but the increased demand led to an unforeseen crisis caused by disk storage overload in the NREN’s data centre.
The challenge
In early September, all the virtual machines running on the URAN cloud unexpectedly shut down. eduGAIN (the interfederation service that connects identity federations around the world) and eduVPN (a secure and encrypted internet connection service) and the learning management systems (LMS) of Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics and Odesa State Agrarian University distant learning were blocked. Even domain names registered for URAN users stopped working as a consequence of the shutdown of URAN DNS servers. It took the URAN technical team over 12 hours to identify and eliminate the cause of this problem.
