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

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