(gs) Updates - Storage Transition. Cluster 5. Fiji Agent & MySQL 5.
In this week’s (gs) Update, we cover the ongoing progress of transitioning (gs) Clusters 1 and 2 to Gen 2 architecture, more news about Cluster 5, an update on our new Fiji and MySQL5 tech, and a bite-sized Anatomy Of piece explaining the finer details of our transition to Gen 2 storage.
Cluster 5 Progress
We are nearly done with getting Cluster 5 online, with an expected arrival within the next week. As we work to upgrade both Gen 1 clusters, we must also sustain our growth. Equal priority is being placed on both objectives. Our recent maintenance on May 10 was one of the last hurdles remaining to bring Cluster 5 online.
Storage Transition
As you may know, a portion of our customers on Cluster 2 recently experienced an extended service interruption. This was covered in detail in System Incident #754. Recovery was a multi-phase process, with our Engineers working around the clock to restore data. While resolving the incident itself was a time-consuming process, we made a lot of smart moves that ultimately helped expedite the overall recovery time.
In keeping with “best practices” we always maintain an inventory of spare equipment in the event of emergencies. In this particular incident we were able to use Gen 2 hardware that was already reserved for our planned transition. Essentially we were able to lay the groundwork necessary for our complete transition away from our older architecture. We currently have around 15,000 sites remaining on Gen 1 hardware. Approximately 2,300 sites were moved to a new storage segment based on Gen 2 hardware as part of resolving the incident.
Gen 2 Hardware vs Gen 2 Architecture
For a cluster to be considered Gen 2 it requires our newer Sun-based hardware, in addition to other dramatic architecture changes as displayed below:
While we are converting all remaining storage segments to Gen 2 hardware, we are essentially in a Gen 1.5 environment for these two clusters. This is an in-between phase until we complete the transition. Over the next few months we will finalize this change and report our progress. Since this will require significant work, most of these changes will occur during off-peak hours in the form of Scheduled Maintenance actions.
Fiji Agent
We have been actively processing cluster move requests with our new Fiji Agent technology. Our engineers have scaled this technology dramatically in the past weeks, allowing our Support Department to move even more sites in parallel. We can even tap into this same power to migrate sites between storage segments on the same cluster, something we were able to do in the past but can now do much more quickly. This technology will prove vital in the coming weeks.
As noted in previous posts, Fiji will ultimately be our migration engine designed to work across all our product lines and datacenter locations. It will be a vital pipeline within the (mt) Media Temple product family.
MySQL 5 BETA for Clusters 1-3
In our last update we mentioned that we were almost ready with MySQL 5 for our first 3 Clusters. A couple of weeks ago we added our initial batch of testers and squashed a few big bugs right away (THANK YOU to those who helped with this first round of testing!). We have another batch ready to go this week. If you are interested in following our progress, we encourage you to join the discussion threads in the (gs) MySQL 5 BETA section of our (mt) User Forums.
