ExchangeDefender SQL Balancer Maintenance Window
This Friday, July 19th, 2013 we will be conducting an upgrade, stress testing and DDoS simulation against ExchangeDefender SQL backend, load balancer backend and the overall infrastructure fault tolerance starting at 3PM and ending at 6PM EST.
During the maintenance window mail flow will not be interrupted and mail delivery will not be delayed. Access to email, LiveArchive, mobile services and so on will not be interrupted either. Access to https://admin.exchangedefender.com site, including the ability to make configuration changes or release SPAM, will be interrupted periodically. Again, no email will be lost or delayed.
Following the upgrade our capacity across the core ExchangeDefender network will be increased which will enable us to launch additional services that will be discussed in the upcoming webinar. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes your clients as they may be presented with the message “We are currently conducting routine maintenance, please try your request again in a few minutes”
Scope of the effort
Isn’t this something you could do outside of the peak hours?
Yes, and we routinely make changes and upgrades during the standard weekend maintenance intervals.
For the purposes of this upgrade and an assessment of the new failover systems brought to the new version of ExchangeDefender, we wanted to run a maintenance interval during the peak usage and ascertain both our ability to handle traffic with the brains of the system offline (ExchangeDefender SQL) as well as test geographic redundancy during peak hours.
We felt it was better to have this done at the same time on a scheduled and controlled circumstances than under the unplanned service outage or DDoS.
As I will discuss next week, we have spent a fair amount of money and time upgrading the network not just to be able to sustain excessive outages but also distributed attacks, hacks and so on. We expect to be able to operate the network in a distributed and autonomous environment should we experience massive changes in Internet routing and availability of global networks. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, international government response to NSA espionage, rise in sophisticated hacking and network exploit activity, the reasons and the manner in which we are executing this maintenance window should be self explanatory.
As always, our staff will be available in higher than usual counts so please count on us.
We will also be providing a play-by-play updates as usual via NOC and our @xdnoc twitter.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
877-546-0316 x500