Knowledge Base/Announcements

Server upgrade this weekend (15-16 January)

Clive McKegg
posted this on January 13, 2011 02:57 pm

 

As part of adding scalability, reliability and security we are in the process of moving our server from Orcon in Auckland to Amazon S3 in Northern California. 
According to their website "Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. 
Amazon S3’s standard storage is:
Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities."
Using Amazon will allow us to deliver Audit Assistant more effectively to more users in more countries, plus allowing us to seamlessly increase storage and server power with increased traffic. It also provides a staging environment for us to test new features in a virtual live environment. 
We have been testing Audit Assistant in the Amazon staging environment and there is no detectable speed change for NZ users. Once we have switched the database over we will then start rolling out new features made possible on the new server.
There is likely to be some down-time over the weekend - we will try to keep this to late night work. Please see the support site for specific times if you need to work over the weekend. 

Amazon.gif  As part of adding scalability, reliability and security we are in the process of moving our server from Orcon in Auckland to Amazon S3 in Northern California. 

According to their website "Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Amazon S3’s standard storage is:

  • Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
  • Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
  • Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities."

Using Amazon will allow us to deliver Audit Assistant more effectively to more users in more countries, plus allowing us to seamlessly increase storage and server power with increased traffic. It also provides a staging environment for us to test new features in a virtual live environment. 

We have been testing Audit Assistant in the Amazon staging environment and there is no detectable speed change for NZ users. Once we have switched the database over we will then start rolling out new features made possible on the new server.

There is likely to be some down-time over the weekend - we will try to keep this to late night work. We will post further details here closer to the time.

Update - Sunday 16th January. Changeover will be tonight from approximately 11:30pm to approx 4:30am. 

Update - Monday 17th January. The upgrade was successfully completed. There are a couple of minor bugs we are aware of getting worked out today. If something is not working as you would expect please contact us through the helpdesk. Thanks.

Update - Tuesday 18th January. We have dealt with most of the bugs but are still experiencing some issues as load comes on the site. We are looking at options to deal with this. We will ensure that we get up to full performance but you may experience some unexpected delays today. Thanks for your patience.

Performance drops substantially under load. We will be switching back to the local server tonight and look at our options.