Late last year we were told that our current collocation facility was unable to provide us with additional resources (power/cooling). So, we decided at that point to begin looking for a new location to host the Plaxo application. This was a large undertaking for the Operations team and required concise timing, and a thorough understanding of how each of the components that make up the Plaxo back-end would respond.

After nearly 4 months of searching for a new location, negotiating details of the contract, procuring new hardware (racks/power management/etc…), securing a solid data migration specialist, and painstaking selection of what systems would be moved when, we were ready to start phase 1 of 2.

Then an interesting issue came up, we were moving some database servers, web servers, various others, but how would they communicate on the back-end with the other existing infrastructure? Well, Layer42 (one of our NSPs) came to the rescue, and was able to provide us with an amazing service, proving their excellent flexibility, and commitment to the customer. They set us up with a literal cross connect between the facilities, even setup some VLANs on this link, allowing those now moved systems to communicate across this link as if they were still on the same LAN. Sweet.

Plaxo designed our back-end infrastructure to not only scale horizontally, but to always have online replicas of critical data, ensuring that those replicas were physically separate systems. This early decision enabled us to move approximately 50% of the site (100+ systems) while the customer never noticed we were in a degraded state. After the first move was successfully completed, we migrated all the database services and caching service from the old location to the new location by simply promoting the secondary copy of each database to be the primary, and vice versa. This was done over 2 weeks, and laid the groundwork for phase 2.

Well, phase 2 was recently completed, and I’m pleased to say it went quite well. Not a single support request asking why the site was offline, or why their data was unavailable.

-- Ethan Erchinger
Operations Manager

There has been a lot of buzz in the news in the past week or so regarding a change in Daylight Saving Time. For the past twenty years, DST has started on the first Sunday of April, but as a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it will change to the second Sunday of March, which in 2007 is this Sunday, March 11.

For people in the tech community, this change is not as simple as turning a clock forward one hour. Since so many computer systems depend on time, the change means late hours for programmers like me so our users can sleep easy knowing that a computer glitch won’t make the users of their applications late for any appointments next week. Since over 15 million people across the globe depend on Plaxo to store and organize their address books and calendar data, we have spent the past couple weeks working to make our system configurations are in ship-shape and we will stay posted next week in the event that any DST-related problems arise.

Many people are reminded of Y2K craze that hit the nation a few years ago. Some of you may be delighted by the fact that you may have another chance to justify the bomb shelter you built 8 years ago, which by now has become merely a storage room for Beanie Babies, VCRs, Ricky Martin albums, and other items that have become obsolete since the dawning of the new millennium. For the rest of you, I think it is safe to say we do not have to worry about a nuclear holocaust so much as our microwave clocks being off by an hour on Sunday, along with all other appliances which have not been programmed to deal with the change.

You may be thinking "What else can I do to prepare for the new DST law?" Most home computers will be updated automatically to deal with the change. Windows users can visit this page which will walk you through a process to confirm your system’s DST integrity. Other than that, see that those you work with are aware of the change by confirming your appointments. So make sure to remind your friends, families, and coworkers that some of their electronic devices might be "misbehaving" and for the ones who don’t use Plaxo, remind them not to miss any appointments ;).

Update: Those of you who are using Outlook may have noticed that some of your recurring calendar events were off by an hour this morning. This has nothing to with Plaxo -- it's a known Outlook bug (they store hard-coded version of the DST rules upon event creation, so old recurring events will have the wrong DST rules). Microsoft has released a tool that finds and fixes these events. You can download it here.

--Glenn Dixon, HipCal Engineer

The product management team is off to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive conference tomorrow morning. For half the team, it'll be their first time in Austin so in addition to the conference, we'll be hitting up 6th street, eating at Salt Lick, and riding mechanical bulls at Midnight Rodeo.

If you're a web 2.0 startup and you're looking for an address book to mash up with, we'd love to make your acquaintance. And if you're a Plaxo user, we've been busy working on a lot of cool new stuff over the past few months. Find us at SXSW and we can give you a sneak peek of what's coming. Drop me an e-mail or IM and we'll meet up at the trade show or one of the panels. I think y'all will be quite impressed :)

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager