Maintenance Window
The next 72 hours will include series of six extensive maintenance tasks spanning three USA-based data centers and two EU-based data centers.
Maintenance Tasks
The first and largest maintenance task involves ExchangeDefender. First we will be adding more servers to the mix. This is a very routine task for us and is expected to produce zero downtime even on the nodes that are active during the transition. After the new nodes are online and older hardware has been swapped out we will proceed to roll out new policy systems which will speed up the daily email SPAM report generation, portal access, MSP control panels and higher-end reseller branding. These processes will continue throughout the weekend and while we will not have any downtime the mail release delays could be delayed up to five minutes. If your message is affected by this delay you will be given a notice when you attempt to release the message.
The second maintenance task involves TheOfficeServer dedicated servers and shared hosted services. We are expanding our portfolio to provide APC MasterSwitch remote reboot to address the complaints regarding Microsoft Windows Server patching problems over the past few months. The APC MasterSwitch software will allow you to remotely power cycle the server through a web interface when the system becomes unresponsive. In order to provide this service we will be gradually powering down and swapping power strips. We expect the downtime related to this task to take roughly 10 minutes. Our engineers will login to your server, trigger a graceful shutdown and move the power cord to the new strip. The downtime exclusively applies to the single switched power supplies, if you have a dual power supply you will not have any downtime associated with this maintenance task.
Own Web Now hosting control panels will be going offline for a period of five minutes during our regularly scheduled maintenance window from 7AM – 8AM GMT on Saturday, December 9th, 2006. This outage will not affect any services (dns, mail, web, databases, etc) but you will not be able to make any configuration changes during this window. If you do have an emergency maintenance issue please contact Own Web Now Corp through the trouble ticket support system.
Warranties
As always, all Own Web Now Corp maintenance tasks are fully scripted, practiced and load tested before being executed on the live production network. We have load tested each ExchangeDefender node at least 500 hours, each power strip has been placed to 80% load (manufacturer recommended maximum load) and held for 24 hours. We have full confidence in the hardware that is being placed into production.
Software Updates
ExchangeDefender has undergone significant changes in underlying infrastructure and reporting services to accommodate the global growth of both our network and our customer base. Although initially you will not see a visual difference in what we have changed you will notice a significant performance boost. This is directly related to the changes in the way we currently collect and build reporting for ExchangeDefender.
Finally,
Thank you for all your support, understanding and patience. Nearly all the changes we are making to ExchangeDefender, Own Web Now Corp and The Office Server systems are directly designed by the feedback submitted by you, our partners and customers. While many of you can appreciate that the recent instabilities have been caused by Microsoft’s diminishing QA of security patches, I personally want to make you aware that we are doing everything we can to both eliminate the problems and continue to work with Microsoft to make sure these issues are minimized in the future.
At no time do we lose sight of the trust you place in us to manage your systems and we’re doing everything we can to deliver on our promise and our message. Thank you for your business!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, CEO, Own Web Now Corp.
