Thu May 18 20:04:13 PDT 2000 — Our new Network Appliance filer has arrived, and we’re preparing for migration of the majority of our customer data to this unit. The Netapp filer hosts all user web data, most email and ftp space. The new filer will also be hosting shell home directories, plus we’ll be migrating mailbox account storage to it as well.
Our current filer has about 50 gigs of storage, and is 96% utilized currently. The new unit has over 100 gigs of storage in the initial configuration, and it can be expanded to up to 900 gigabytes. The filer has fiber-optic gigabit (1000Mbps) Ethernet and a much faster CPU, so we should see overall performance increases in web, mail, ftp and other areas. While the current unit has redundant power in the disk shelves but not the CPU, the new filer is fully redundant and will actually be served by two entirely separate UPS systems out of our new downstairs power room so that there is no single potential point of failure.
We’re hoping to migrate to the new unit around the weekend of June 3rd. There will be some downtime involved for hosted websites and users checking and sending email. Email will be queued up for delivery as soon as the migration is complete, and full backups have been made and will be maintained in case we have unforeseen troubles. We will post a more definite timeline and downtime projection once we have completed our migration planning. -Dane, Scott, Eli, Steve, Dave and Kelsey