After a few months of planning, our infrastructure team here at Accelo is looking forward to a very big weekend - the weekend after next we'll be moving to a whole new data center in Oregon!
While we're staying with the mighty Amazon Web Services (whose cloud is more than double the size of Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Rackspace and Google combined), we're moving data centers to the more cutting-edge Oregon AWS region.
As we've continued to innovate with Accelo in the 2 years since moving to AWS, we've realized there's often new functionality and features available in Oregon that comes to Northern California later.
To make sure we've got access to the most powerful features, we're making the move north, and taking the opportunity to perform a range of other important steps like major upgrades to the underlying operating systems and system versions which you really only want to do if you're able to have a parallel test site running like we do now.
Another benefit of moving to the Oregon facility is environmental - Oregon has some of the cleanest power in the United States, with 99.8% of its power coming from renewables.
With servers and their necessary air conditioning systems being very very power hungry, moving to a data center running on clean power is a nice benefit.
The third benefit of moving to Oregon is that we're able to invest in more redundancy. While more expensive than our current configuration, this move will eliminate almost all single points of failure, including the most storage and computationally intensive things our systems need to do with us running complete replicas in a hot parallel mode.
Additionally, Oregon has 50% more redundancy built into the AWS network/platform (it has three availability zones, compared to Northern California's two) so while we hope not to need them, having the extra redundancy is a good thing!
Unfortunately, moving states and having data that is constantly being updated and processed means we will need to have an outage to ensure we don't end up with updated data scattered between the old and new locations while we're doing the cut over. The maintenance window during the migration will be for up to 8 hours, although our engineering team is quietly confident they'll be able to get things done in less time than this.
Update: apologies for our email having the incorrect dates previously - the correct dates are Sat 19th and Sun 20th of March.
The window, in various timezones around the world, is outlined below:
If you've got any questions regarding this maintenance window, please don't hesitate to email support@accelo.com.
