Archive for the ‘Service’ Category

At 5 PM PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, Syncplicity will be performing a major scheduled upgrade.  Given the size and complexity of the change, we expect the transition to take about seven hours. During this time, your computer will be unable to synchronize with Syncplicity and my.syncplicity.com will be unavailable.  www.syncplicity.com and blog.syncplicity.com will continue to be available.

You can leave your client running during this time — it will automatically reconnect and resume synchronizing when we are back up.  And of course, your data and account information will be kept safe & secure throughout the process.

Our team will be working throughout the night until this migration is complete — we will be twittering updates (http://twitter.com/syncplicity) along the way.  Feel free to say hi if you’re online too.

For those of you wondering what we’re up to, here’s the scoop:

Behind the scenes, Syncplicity runs on some pretty serious hardware.  Part of my job is to keep it running smoothly and plan for future growth.

The Syncplicity servers handle millions of requests every day.  During the past few months, Syncplicity has been growing quickly and our servers have been under an increasingly high load.  Even with several hardware upgrades, we’ve still had some brownouts during which some of you were unable to get the instant synchronization we built into the service.  Like you, we notice when our tray icon turns gray.

A month ago, we embarked on a plan to perform a major refresh of our infrastructure to eliminate these problems and ensure ample room to grow.  We’ve invested heavily in new servers and a new architecture that we’re finally ready to unveil.  Our server count is tripling. Individual servers will be more powerful.

For example, as part of the upgrade, all our database servers will be moving to quad-proc, quad-core servers.  Watching 16 cores in action is intense.  We’re also scaling out to increase redundancy and improve reliability and scalability.  This translates into a better experience for all users and as a small bonus, I know I’ll be sleeping better at night.

Thanks,
Isaac

VP of Technology

Update @ 8pm PST: Everything is back up and the service is running normally. Send an e-mail to support@syncplicity.com if you’re running into any problems.

A cluster of servers hosted at Rackspace got knocked offline due to a power failure at Rackspace. Included in this cluster are the Syncplicity web servers as well as the main Syncplicity database servers. We’re waiting on Rackspace to stabilize our rack and are working with Rackspace right now to make sure everything comes back online normally. We’ll post updates as we hear them.

Last update from Rackspace:

July 9th 2008 — At approximately 5:00 P.M. CDT, our DFW data center experienced a brief loss of utility power that caused a transfer over to generator as designed. During this transition, some of the chillers did not start up correctly and temperatures within certain areas of the DC began to rise to the 90’s. The issue has been isolated and temperatures are decreasing steadily. We are investigating this issue and will provide future updates as they come available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you or your customers.