This announcement is just a reminder of today's downtime at 1PM EST. We have sent an e-mail to all of our clients on Monday (8/15) with more details regarding the downtime but here is a quick overview:
We will be replacing our current PDU (Power Distribution Unit) in our cabinet at GoRACK with a much better PDU that will allow us to better utilize our primary circuit and therefore reduce our power costs by not requiring multiple circuits like we currently have. Unfortunately this will require us to bring down our whole cabinet while we move all of our servers and appliances to the new PDU (meaning we'll need to uplug everything and plug it back into another outlet so power loss is unavoidable). Since we will be replacing the current PDUs with the newer one, downtime is expected to be no more than 20 minutes (powering off and powering on each node is a somewhat lengthy process due to each VPS being gracefully turned on and off individually). Below is an outline of the expected maintenance:
TIMES ARE NOT EXACT DUE TO VARIOUS FACTORS OUT OF OUR CONTROL. ACTUAL TIMES MAY BE DIFFERENT. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER ON 8/18 FOR MORE EXACT TIMES.
8/16 - 8/17 : Perform a complete backup of each node (this may result in some temporary slowness).
1:00PM EST : Tweet about the start of maintenance.
1:00 - 1:15PM EST : Power down each node gracefully and then power down the network.
1:15 - 1:20PM EST : Replace current PDU with new PDU on our primary circuit and move all servers and appliances to outlets on new PDU.
1:20PM EST : Power on the network and then power on each node (confirming network connectivity to each IP via off-site script).
1:20PM EST : Post announcement on website about the completed maintenance.
We will be posting updates on our Twitter throughout the day and during the downtime our website will be offline.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
