Dear Customers, We've prepared the following to help answer your questions about our data center move. * Why is Tucows moving data centers? We are moving to a premium data center to increase the reliability, redundancy and overall network availability of our services. We know you rely on us to deliver a quality experience to your end users, and we take that responsibility seriously. After a thorough evaluation of providers, our network operations staff chose Q9 Networks to be the new home for our data center. As always, we'll have remote access from our own Network Operations Center to our servers and devices for both monitoring and trouble-shooting. * What about the network? The Q9 network is fully redundant and has been designed specifically for reliability and performance. It includes connections to more than 20 Internet service providers, minimizing network latency and maximizing reliability in the event of a failure on any single backbone network. The Q9 network is backed by a 100% availability service level agreement. * When will you be affected? The major service-related moves are scheduled for: April 7 - Blogware April 21 - Domains/OpenSRS April 28 - Tucows Email Service and Managed DNS Other service-related moves are scheduled until the end of April 2007. We've planned the move in a way that will minimize impact on you and your end-users. Wherever possible, moves are happening during off-peak hours and on weekends. If for any reason, we feel we are introducing undo risk by undertaking a move, we will adjust the schedule and notify you if anything changes. * When will you have more details about the specifics of the major service-related moves? Because our schedule is subject to change, we'll send you a move notification via email two weeks before each service-impacting move. We'll also post these to the What's New page on the Reseller Resource Center (rrc.tucows.com) and on the related Discuss Lists (discuss.tucows.com). These notices will include details about end-user impact and the length and timing of the maintenance window. Tucows System Status (status.tucows.com) is updated real-time and will send alerts at the opening and closing of the maintenance windows. * What services will be affected by this data center move? We've taken care to ensure we move in a staggered approach so that services are not affected simultaneously. The following services will be affected: - All domains via OpenSRS and OpenHRS - Whois - Auctions - Parked Pages - Blogware - Website Builder - Managed DNS - Digital Certificates - Tucows Email Service - Feedcache - Start Service - Tucows Insight Reporting - RRC: Reseller Resource Center * What services won't be affected by this data center move? Email Defense and Hosted Email will not be affected. * What if something goes wrong? What kind of disaster recovery plan is in place? While we anticipate no major issues, we have operational and technical contingency plans in place to ensure we are prepared to respond. Additional Support personnel are working on major move dates. If you need to reach us, the most efficient way to reach our Support team is by sending an email with the details of your issue to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Our Support number is 800) 371-6992. Please refer to System Status (status.tucows.com) for real-time information about our services. We've setup our network so that our services can seamlessly operate in both data centers at the same time. Most of our services are pooled and have sufficient capacity so that some of the infrastructure can move without any impact. Over the last two weeks we have taken one server out of each of our service pools and have proven our move strategy works. We have purchased new shared storage devices in our new facility. This, coupled with our approach to the network, enables us to failover to either data center should we need to. It also mitigates any risk with physical moves of shared storage devices. As an added measure our backup infrastructure operates out of yet another location. Should issues arise with either of our devices we can fall back to traditional recovery methods. * Will any service-related IPs change? There are no IP changes for existing services. * Do I have to make any changes on my system? No system changes are required. * Do I need to do anything? We recommend you notify your end-users based on the end-user impact details provided in our notification emails that will be posted to the Reseller Resource Centre (rrc.tucows.com) and to the appropriate discuss list (discuss.tucows.com). * What steps have you taken to ensure no new problems are introduced during the move? We are in a production code-freeze until after the move. We'll promote fixes for critical service-impacting issues only. The code freeze is one of the steps we've taken to guard against destabilizing our environment during the move. While we're in the production code-freeze we're working on the non-critical service-impacting issues you've identified to Support. Once we're in our new data center and our environment is stable, we'll promote those fixes. * You're having problems with Email Defense, why do this now? The Email Defense service is not impacted by this move. Two distinct and separate teams are working on the Email Defense and Moves projects. We will continue to work in parallel until the issues with Email Defense are resolved and the Data Center Move project is complete. Heather Leson Technical Support Analyst TUCOWS INC. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
