mail.blacknight.com / smtpr1.cp.blacknight.com major maintenance

Message

Summary: On 23:00 on Monday 10th of October we're going to take the mail cluster offline completely for approx 4 hours until 03:00. This is to facilitate the following:

1) Upgraded storage space for the mail store
2) Upgraded performance for the mail store
3) Upgraded file system from ext3 to ext4 for performance reasons

We're doing this in stages.

Stage 1)

We've restored the existing mail system from a recent backup to a new location. We'll begin copying that data to the new Mail Storage node which has 20Gbit/s of connectivity to our SAN. We estimate that this will take approx 24-48 hours to complete.

Stage 2)

We will then take the mail system offline again in a couple of nights to do a final sync of the changes on the new system. This will depend largely on the amount of time it takes to do the copy over to the SAN. Estimations range from between 36 and 50 hours approx.

Tonight we're simply relocating the servers to a new rack in close proximity to our SAN. And while they're down we're doing a clean up of old mailboxes and purging data that is no longer required.