Thursday, January 15, 2015

MBS Datacenter Maintenance Window Announcement (1/16/2015)

In the tradition of Tim Allen's Home Improvement character, we need to add more power to our rack! To date we have been on a 20amp circuit, and are changing over to a 30amp circuit. The circuit's been installed for us, so it's just a matter of putting new power distribution units (PDUs) in our rack and moving all of the equipment's plugs to them.

We decided to do this 'live' to test our power redundancy strategy. Because we have designed full redundancy into our rack's power (two circuits with all devices being plugged into both), we anticipate zero downtime for our clients. But we thought we should let 'em know-- just in case!

We plan to begin the cutover at about 3pm Pacific time (6pm Eastern, etc) on Friday, January 16th.

We chose Friday hoping that it would minimize the possible impact on the more than 100 servers we host and those who depend on them. If you are one of our hosted clients, please let your user community know of the planned maintenance window so they can anticipate it. And we welcome your prayers!

Thank you again for the privilege we have of serving you and your team! We are very thankful to be partners with you in ministry.

New Article: All Data Is Vulnerable

I just released a new article for publication addressing how vulnerable our data is, and some simple steps to improve that. Here's the opening paragraph:
Sony. The US government. The news is often filled with 'the latest' cyberattack. It seems like all of our data is vulnerable. What should we do about it? What can we do about it?

I put a copy of the article on our website, and you can read it for free; just click here!