Within the hour, I will be posting a link to this thread on our server status page (http://www.charlottezweb.com/clients/serverstatus.php) (which now shows maintenance messages) and will be sending an email from our billing system to all customers with accounts on our server "Sandstorm."
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This coming Saturday morning at approximately 2am EST, the datacenter will begin migrating our server Sandstorm to a new parent. From an outage perspective, we will likely experience up to 30 minutes (typically about half that) right around 2am when they start. Then the server will be up normally (although possibly a bit slower) while the data copies over to the new parent in the background. When that's done, there will be another restart to activate Sandstorm again.
To provide some background...
Sandstorm is one of newer cloud servers. As a virtual server instance, it is managed by a "parent" that is responsible for storage among other things. In this case, the parent has one (or more) harddrives in its RAID array that is reporting errors. This happens from time to time of course but what's nice is the datacenter is migrating us to a new parent so that we don't see any extended downtime. To complete this migration process, there will be a couple outages while data is backed up, copied and resynched. This is the same process if we wanted to upgrade any of our virtual servers. We've done this for two servers now and both times have gone quite smoothly.
The last time we did this (http://www.charlottezweb.com/forums/index.php?topic=1780.0) (for our server Avalanche), the total outage involved for both restarts was approx 30 minutes combined.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here. I will post updates that day as I receive them.
Thanks,
Jason
The migration started at 2am EST this morning as scheduled. Pingdom detected approximately 7 minutes of disruption around 2:10am EST.
I'm waiting on a status report of where we are in the process now. Once the data finishes transferring, there will be another period of downtime.
Thank you,
Jason
This was completed around 9:33am EST. The second restart was recorded at around 12 minutes of outage by Pingdom.
We should be all set now - thanks!