This Saturday, August 4, from approximately 2pm to 5pm PST (GMT -0700), our web site will be offline while we move our servers to a new data center in downtown Portland.
We have carefully planned this over the last 3 weeks to ensure that tracking will still be online during this time (no data will be lost and there will be no impact on your site’s performance), and that the move itself will be as fast as humanly possible. The new data center is already pre-railed and pre-wired with power and ethernet, so de-racking and re-racking will be extremely fast. So why will it take ~3 hours? Well, the old data center is about 90 miles away… 🙁
New machines are already setup at the new data center to support tracking during the move. When the database servers get plugged in here, they will automatically start parsing the ~3 hour back log of traffic they will each have waiting for them on the tracking servers. It will take a good 3-6 hours from that point for all servers to catch back up with real time again.
This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while but as we grew to over 50 physical servers, it became unfeasible. However, thanks to our full virtualization that was completed in June after many months of work, we are down to just 11 physicals! Suddenly this dream became a real possibility so we jumped at the opportunity to make it happen before we needed to add any more hardware to the rack.
To say we’re excited would be the understatement of the year. We’ve been with the same host as we’ve grown to enormous bandwidth over 6 years, so they’ve had to grow with us, which has been the cause of most of our major outages. The new data center is enterprise class with internet connectivity across 8 unique providers, so problems with internet connectivity should be near zero. Portland is much more major hub than where we were before, so connectivity should also be significantly faster, especially for those of you outside the US. Last, being 15 minutes away from our data center instead of 90 will be a very welcome change when we need to take a trip there.
A lot of time has been spent over the last 4 months on backend/sysadmin work like this, which has interrupted our regular flow of feature releases. We’ll be back to that very soon, don’t worry.
