New storage and application server hardware deployed

Yesterday we deployed 4 new application servers, 2 new storage servers and another switch to increase the capacity of our virtual machine cluster in our computing center in Oberhausen. The storage servers now feature 8 SAS 15k  600 GB disks in RAID 5 which should give a good performance boost over the previous SATA-based setup.


Here's pictures of thew newly deployed hardware. Note the neatly arranged cabling!




Infrastructure maintenance in computing center Oberhausen, 2010-08-26 04:00 - 06:00 CEST

Our computing center operator announced that he will perform infrastructure maintenance on 2010-08-26 04:00 - 06:00 to improve the quality, stability, and performance of the switching services.

The work only impacts redundant devices and will only result in very short interruptions.

System update review, next try on 2010-08-24, 20:00 - 24:00 CEST

The system update yesterday went smooth in the sense that no downtime was caused and that we can deploy new hardware tomorrow.

Unfortunately we were unable to update many machines due to an unexpected slow package update preparation procedure that required most of the scheduled downtime.

We are now continuously updating the physical machines over the next days and will attempt another update of the customer-oriented virtual machines next Tuesday between 20:00 and 24:00.

Urgent system update tonight including downtime, 2010-08-18, 20:00 - 24:00 CEST

Due to a planned hardware expansion (new application and storage servers) in our hosting center that is scheduled for Friday we have to urgently deploy a general system update (updated operating system packages, as well as configuration and monitoring improvements).

This will require a restart of all physical and virtual machines as the kernel will be updated.

The update will start at 20:00 CEST tonight and we're hoping to be done by 24:00 CEST. The actual downtime of individual machines is expected to be significantly less than 1 hour.

All of our services provided from the hosting centre in Oberhausen (private and shared virtual machines, mail server, internal monitoring and infrastructure) will be affected at some point during the maintenance period.

Customers with access to the Nagios monitoring infrastructure will receive notifications about the specific service and host availability.

gocept.net blog restructuring

We'd like this blog to become more accessible to our customers and thus we spent a little time today to improve it.

The largest change is that we have split the blog into two separate blogs: one for our international customers that like to communicate in English (that's the blog you are reading right now) and one for our Germany-based customers who prefer communication in German (that's at gocepthostingde.blogspot.com). This change should improve the readability for our international customers and allows us to have two separate RSS/Atom feeds based on the language.

We also updated the design to use a current Blogspot template and also our current corporate design elements.

We hope you like the changes  and - if you have an oppinion - we'd like to hear from you!