Facility Upgrade

A lot of the work that we've been doing this year has been focused on technical systems and fixes - including server side optimizations that have allowed us to streamline our hardware footprint.

While our current set-up has "aged gracefully", overall, our infrastructure has a number of years on it and there's a concern that we'll have a critical failure on one of the DB servers or networking hardware. Over the years, we've done a number of hardware replacements, but the time has come to do a full refresh.

There's still some details regarding schedule, but we'll be doing a full refresh of our hardware this month and working with IBM's Softlayer for facility. Softlayer is a great facility partner and I'm sure we'll have many year with them - just like Limelight has been a great facility provider. A facility refresh might sound like a big deal, but we have a lot of experience with hardware shuffles over the years.

As the schedule firms up, we'll let everyone know timing and have an extended Tuesday maintenance. Our current facility provider Limelight has their main business in content distribution. Co-location with us is kind of a special case. As Limelight is doing various facility changes for the New Year, it seemed like a good time for us to make a switch to someone who has hosting as a more mainline business. Many thanks to Limelight for the years of great support and service.

There's nothing like starting 2016 with new 12 core processors, lots of RAM and some shiny new switches.

There might be some bumps during the transition, but nothing we can't handle. The new hardware is expected to provide some nice performance streamlining, and is certainly better for our future development. As we firm up the the schedule, we'll let everyone know.

Istaria Development Team