Hardware Migration [02/22/2012] - [02/24/2012]

[Tony]

Starting on Wednesday February 22nd we will be migrating the Cougar server to new higher end hardware as well as better system configuration. We feel this will benefit all users on the Cougar server. We estimate this will be completed no later than Friday February 24th.

We expect no more than 5 minutes of downtime per account as we will be moving accounts to the new server then re-routing the IP address to the new hardware. This means there will be no changes to DNS and as a result no dns progation issues. In our experience our migration method means the large majority of users will not even realize that they've switched servers. If you do however run into any issues do not hesitant to contact us as our system administrators are prepared to resolve any issues experienced.

The new Cougar server will be similar to that of our recent deployment of servers:

Old Cougar:

Dual Xeon E5620

24GB RAM

4x300GB Raid-10

New Cougar:

Dual Xeon X5670

24GB RAM

4x600GB Raid-10

So this is a pretty big upgrade as it will have four additional CPU cores with 8 to the operating system counting hyper threading. It will also be using 600GB disks over 300GB disks of the old system.

Once the migration starts the current Cougar system will be named oldcougar while the new one will become Cougar this is one thing to keep in mind during the migration.

If you have any questions regarding the maintenance do not hesitate to contact us. Our system administration department is available to answer any questions regarding this.

Start Date: 02/22/2012

End Date: 02/24/2012

Estimated Down Time: less than 5 minutes

Duration: 3 days

[Tony]

This has been started

[Tony]

This has been completed.