GPWA Website Datacenter Move and Planned Downtime

This Saturday morning, 25 June 2016, sometime between 6am and noon GMT we are expecting to move the GPWA web and database servers (that is between midnight and 6am Eastern Time where we are located). We expect the move might take as long as an hour, and the GPWA website will not be available while the move takes place. Part of the reason I am not currently more certain about the exact time the GPWA website will be down is that moving the GPWA servers is actually a small part of a much larger move involving about 50 web and database servers.

I will make additional posts in this thread letting folks know when the move has actually taken place.

Our datacenter is currently located in the same building as our former office, where our company resided for 25 years. This is actually a pretty exciting move for us because the new datacenter is located in a building we will soon own. In fact, I just signed the purchase and sale agreement for the building yesterday evening. Moving our datacenter represents an important step in a moving effort that began several months ago, and will go on for several more months before it is complete. For the time being the only operational facilities in the new building will be our datacenter. Most of the interior of the building is currently gutted, and we will be finishing it out as office space, and then moving all of our staff into the building as well.

Michael

Current expectations are that the move of the GPWA web and database servers will begin between 1:30am and 2:30am EDT Saturday morning and take up to an hour to complete. This anticipated start time range corresponds with 5:30am to 6:30am GMT. The GPWA server migration is part of the fourth wave in a series of server migrations that will start around 11:00pm EST tonight, so the exact start time will vary based on the speed with which the prior waves of server moves are accomplished.

There may also be some periods of poorer than usual service as well on Saturday morning, since the change in the location of our datacenter means that internet traffic directed to our web servers will be routed over new routes by different service providers to our new geographic location. Any traffic routed to the former datacenter location during the migration will be rerouted via a VPN tunnel to the new location since there will be a period of time where the new routes that should be used to reach our servers will not be universally known across the internet.

Michael