This weekend we’ll be doing a major upgrade of our data center to make it more environmentally friendly. 

The short story is that we’re upgrading to highly energy efficient, state of the art servers to host our website.  This will provide many benefits including an impressive reduction in energy use (see announcement here), speedier site performance, and less time spent managing our old server farm (which has over 70 computer servers).

Our Engineering team has spent months preparing for this event. They will literally be moving equipment to a new facility, and then configuring all the new hardware.  It’s a big job that requires our entire Engineering, Information Technology, and Quality Assurance teams to make sure everything is set up and working properly.

During the move, much of the site will be “read only” – meaning that you can read the web pages, but you can’t interact with them.  For example, you can look at e-cards, but not send any.    As you can imagine, this has caused us great angst and concern, as we take significant pains to keep the site up 24x7.  Having much of the site unusable for an entire weekend is painful, but our engineers have done a fantastic job to enable parts of the site to be fully functional (such as webmail, petitions, and the click to donate races), and we believe the long term benefit of this upgrade is worth the pain.

All of the software and member data is securely stored, so there is no concern about that. But, given the scale and scope of this project, including some of the unknowns associated with running our site on new servers, it’s almost inevitable something will not go according to plan.   The good news though is that we’ve got an absolutely world class engineering team that will be ready to tackle any surprises. Worst case scenario is they set everything up in the new location, things don’t work, and they have to carry everything back to the old facility and try again later.

I’m feeling good about this - but have my fingers crossed just in case