It's been a crazy week at Secure Dragon but it looks like things are calming down a bit. Our big build last week didn't go as well as we had planned so we spent all last weekend doing as much as we could to fix it remotely but unfortunately all of the band-aids we applied were very very temporary.
It was decided earlier this week that one of our partners, Jeremy, was to part ways with Secure Dragon LLC. and resulted in a complete rebuild of our infrastructure (twice in 1 week?!). Tuesday night we moved all of our VPSs over to a temporary server that GoRACK was generous enough to provide to us on very short notice and once all of the VPSs were moved over and safe. On Wednesday Joe drove to GoRACK again and took our whole cabinet offline for a complete rebuild from scratch with the help of Curtis at GoRACK for his assistance during this 10 hour task. Luckily there was no downtime experienced except for SolusVM which remained on our old hardware and was down for a few minutes for testing our network connectivity. Again, no client VPSs were affected although I/O speeds were reported to be slow during the migration (current tests show 80-110MB/s).
We have had to make a lot of changes on the backend on how we manage things but from a client perspective very few changes were made but here is a list to help you understand what impact these changes will have for you, if any:
- SolusVM is now hosted on it's own server with the following URL: https://master.securedragon.net:5656
- We have decided to ditch our initial plans of utilizing a central storage method (i.e. SAN) for now and will continue using local storage for all of our nodes for improved performance, stability, and security. In the future we will explore this possibility again. Disk I/O speeds should exceed 100MB/s.
- We will be working on providing Xen and KVM product lines. Current testing has not started so there is no ETA but we have more hardware on the way to GoRACK right now and once it arrives the testing phase will begin and we hope to have either Xen or KVM (possibly both) available very shortly.
- Other product lines, such as shared hosting, are in the works and should also be available shortly.
- Backup servers are being assembled, configured, and tested to provide you with a secure backup option of your VPSs.
- We are working on a special monitoring system that will tie into all of our VPSs so allow for enhanced monitoring so that we can react if your VPS goes offline or becomes unresponsive.
- An informational site is being developed that will provide you with a central point of information about Secure Dragon LLC. along with the ability to provide feedback and interact with other members. This site will be hosted in another data center to ensure 100% availability.
- We have a handful of candidates that we may be adding to our team in the near future to assist with basic support and monitoring so you may be seeing some new names replying to some of your tickets.
We want to assure you that none of the changes or issues we have experienced should be considered a setback or a sign of things to come. We looked at the problems, fixed them immediately, and most importantly we learned from them. Every decision we've made and will make is always with you in mind and always in the best interest of Secure Dragon, you being the most important (without our clients, we wouldn't be a company). We have made every attempt to keep communication open in the past and will continue to improve upon that in the future.
With the recent fall of some prominent hosting providers, we understand that a lot of you are wary about where you host your data and where you invest your time and money. If you have any uncertainty about what has transpired or what the future may hold please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with all of the information you need to make a sound and informed decision.
Friday, July 8, 2011
