MOVED: Extended Downtime Thursday, May 11th, 09:00-21:00 for Database Hardware and Software Upgrades

Update: Hardare upgrades have been moved back one day to Thursday the 11th. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We're upgrading our Database hardware to the new IBM xSeries x460 and migrating to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The hardware will start out with pairs of Dual-Core Intel XEON 3.0 GHz CPU's with 64 GB of RAM, and will eventually be scaled up even further. This upgrade will bring the entire database layer, from end-to-end, up to 64-bit.

We are maintaning the current hardware redundancy, there will be an identical machine running in a hot-standby configuaration able to take over the active database server's duties within seconds in the event of a failure.

Additionally, the xSeries allows us to chain together more of these beasts to have up to 32 processors (equivalent to 64 processors if Dual-Core). This allows us to easily throw more hardware at the problem. Our inner-geeks are, suffice to say, quite happy :)

We expect the performance increase resulting from the upgrade to our database layers to be "considerable".

Due to the high-risk nature of this upgrade, please be sure to set long skill training. We are estimating a downtime of 12 hours, but there is the possibility it will run longer. We have tested this migration several times inhouse, but as you know, Mr. Murphy might decide to pay a visit.