FURTHER UPGRADING COMPLETED - 31 May 2008 (Saturday)

Dear Anon (Hidden for Privacy),

We were able to further upgrade one of the new server from Dual Processor Quad Core Clovertown 2.0Ghz (8 x CPUs) to Dual Processor Quad Core Harpertown 2.66Ghz (8 x CPUs).

Our website is now powered by 2 x Harpertown servers, so both server can give the same performance.

- Dual Processor Quad Core Harpertown 2.66Ghz (8 x CPUs)
- Dual Processor Quad Core Harpertown 2.66Ghz (8 x CPUs)

Hope you enjoy a faster and smoother website access

Warmest Regards
Robert Lee
GEOMANCY.NET - Center for Applied Feng Shui Research

UPRADING COMPLETED - 20 May 2008 (Tuesday)

Dear Anon (Hidden for Privacy),

As of 20 May 2008 (Tuesday), we have completed our upgrading all our servers to the new servers. There was no downtime during the uprading, as it was seemlessly transferred. So far as of 22 May 2008 (Thursday), everything seems to be working fine. We had also been fine tuning and tweaking the performance of the servers.

Here are some of the notable improvements:-

- Website with dynamic database contents should will now load significantly faster (ie forum page generation time has improved at least 5 times due to memory caching, http caching and latest CGI caching).

- Report generation server also should see complex reports generated 2 times faster. Reducing the most complex report to half the time required.

- Servers are at located at two different datacenter. Even if a datacenter can promise 100% uptime, from time to time, network issues may still occur. So having servers at different sites, reduces the chances of a single point of failure at any one time by any one  single datacenter.

- Given we have setup two servers with the ability for one server to run entire site, we are able to ensure that should one server be taken offline (for whatever reasons), the other server will be able to continue to keep the website up and running. So DNS failover setup was enabled for key sites and mail servers.

- Data backup has always been our top priority, so all servers we had been using is always setup with RAID 1 Hardware mirroring (ie two harddisk mirroring the same data.) This will prevent again a single harddisk failure. In addition, we also have offsite, and NAS backup, realtime backup to the other RAID 1 server. So data will always be kept current. And/or we will be able to restore a few days older data in an event of a data corruption.

- We now have separate Hardware Firewall at each server rather than a shared firewall. This makes upgrading individual servers easy in the future without having to upgrade both. Also, this eliminate again a single point failure due to Firewall. Hardware firewall is still better than any software firewall. So we do want to compromise security.

- We took this opportunity to make sure all the software are patched to the latest version. By upgrading our server almost every year, we not only refresh new hardware, it allow us to update our software keeping everything fresh.

So far everything is up and running properly. Should you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me at support@geomancy.net.

Warmest Regards
Robert Lee
GEOMANCY.NET - Center for Applied Feng Shui Research

PRE-UPGRADING NOTICE

Dear Anon (Hidden for Privacy),

Thank you very much for your continued support. Our website has experienced tremendous growth over the years.

We are thus upgrading our servers to ensure that there will be sufficient capacity and processing power to allow users to be able to enjoy a faster website.

Our Dual Operton Servers (one of the better technology at that time) had served us very well. However, it is now outdated compared to what's available, so it is time to upgrade to the latest technology:-

- Dual Processor Quad Core Harpertown 2.66Ghz (8 x CPUs)
- Dual Processor Quad Core Clovertown 2.0Ghz (8 x CPUs)

These servers effectively more than double/triple the overall processing power, memory, storage capacity, latest firewall and server bandwidth compared to the existing server setup.

To further improve our network redundancy, we opted for two separate datacenter this time round. This is to provide further network redundancy from a single-point failure in case one datacenter is down. This will be an improvement over the previous setup as both servers were from the same datacenter.

Main websites has Failover DNS to ensure that should one server be down, the backup server will be on activated to keep the website up and runing.

The servers are in the final stages of testing before we offically deploy them before the end of the month.

We do not foresee any major disruption or downtime as we will seemlessly transfer the server from the old server to the new server. 

Only slight inconvience could be some duplicate mails received by users during the migration period as new server may re-process some of the old mail in server queue. Otherwise, everything should be rather seemless.

Thank you for your continued support!

Warmest Regards
Robert Lee
GEOMANCY.NET - Center for Applied Feng Shui Research