Hardware Migration [04/10/2012] - [04/12/2012]

[Tony]

Starting on Tuesday April 10th we will be migrating the Tornado server to new higher end hardware as well as better system configuration. We feel this will benefit all users on the Tornado server. We estimate this will be completed no later than Thursday April 12th.

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 propagation 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 Tornado server will be similar to that of our recent deployment of servers:

Old Tornado:

Dual Xeon E5520

24GB RAM

4x300GB Raid-10

New Tornado:

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 as accounts transfer over they will go onto the newtornado hostname until the entire migration is complete when the new hardware will become tornado and the old server oldtornado.

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: 04/10/2012

End Date: 04/12/2012

Estimated Down Time: less than 5 minutes

Duration: 3 days

[Tony]

This is well underway

[Tony]

We're adjusting this window to go until the end of Friday as the migration has gone slower than expected.

[Tony]

This has been completed.