photo credit verysnappy
We didn't want to announce this until we had exact timelines in place, but I am really please to announce
that Pixie is moving!!! YAY! :D
For the last three and a half years, Pixie has been hosted in Data Electronics, Dublin and today will be
our last day there! Essentially we've decided to undertake the costly and mammoth task of physically moving
all of our servers, storage, firewalls and switches! We
spent months trying to figure out not only how we would move all of our kit, but also where we would move
to. We visited, interviewed and got quotations from nearly every data center in the country...
One Company Stood Out
This company is going to work with us, not against us. This company understands the needs of companies
like Pixie as is flexible enough to be able to provide us with exactly what we require. We've already been
working with them for a couple of years and we trust them. I'd like to personally thank Michele
Neylon, Paul Kelly and their team at Blacknight who have worked
hard to provided us with a really flexible and cost effective package which we simply couldn't have obtained
anywhere else.
Yes, we are moving to Blacknight's co-location facility in Interxion's custom built data center and we're doing it TONIGHT!
The Plan
The plan actually began last night... Unbeknown to the thousands of Pixie users who were busy upload and
viewing photos at the time, we moved half of the Pixie servers, firewalls, switches etc. The painstaking
process involved de-racking each piece of equipment: carefully removing power (each server has two power
cables), network (each server has 5 network cables), the machine and it's rails without disturbing the
remaining live machines. To get an idea of what I mean, imagine removing the 2rd, 4th and 5th server down in
this photo:
We did all this all last night, and then packaged everything up, physically transported the kit and re-
racked in the new data center.
Starting at 19:00 this evening (30th September 2010) we will start bringing the Pixie service down for
the first time in nearly four years. The entire service has already been fully backed up and we will perform
a last minute sync of all the storage and backups to ensure everything is 100%. All remaining live machines
will be de-racked, packed up and transported to Interxion where it will be re-racked. Blacknight will do
their magic and move our IP transit links from DEG to IX and in theory, we should be able to just switch
everything back on. :)
In reality, there are going to be glitches and the reason we decided to start the move so early (19:00)
is simply because we don't know what gotchas might lie ahead and if we have to work all night, so be it. We
absolutely need to be back up and running by the following morning hence giving ourselves as much buffer
time as possible.
This is a huge task that lies ahead of us tonight, so please bear with us and forgive the downtime which
we *hope* will only be around 4-5 hours all going well. If anyone wants to wish us luck, don't be shy - we
need it!
Marcus
