We’re constantly looking for ways to make the system run faster, whether it’s code optimisation, introducing new technology tuned for a specific purpose or in some cases simply purchasing new hardware.
Our database servers have reached the end of their lives and whilst still completely functional, they aren’t allowing us to make the improvements we need to – so we’ve invested in some brand new powerful ones! The old servers were DELL PowerEdge 2950’s, with 32GB memory, dual quad core processors and 10k RPM hard drives. Our new boxes are the much newer DELL R710’s. Each box has 144GB of memory, faster 15k hard drives and newer CPU’s which are quicker and have more on-board cache. This means that across all the boxes in the database infrastructure there is a total of 1728 GB RAM, 24 CPU’s with 96 cores and over 14TB storage!
As part of the migration work we’re upgrading our databases to run the latest MySQL 5.5 which we’ve been working hard to performance tune to get the most out of the new hardware. We’re also making some big changes in the database itself, segmenting out some of the data to dedicated server pools to again improve performance and allow future room to grow.
In order to migrate over the new, more powerful server infrastructure we need to plan a maintenance window and take the application and all associated tools offline. This maintenance will occur this Thursday 24 March between 02:00 – 03:00 GMT. During the 1 hour outage, all WLD services, applications & feeds will be unavailable. All scheduled tasks will also be paused and re-run manually if their timing falls within the maintenance window.
It is unfortunate we have to disable the application, however in order to ensure no data is lost it is an unavoidable step and the time selected is a quieter period. We look forward to working with the faster, extremely powerful hardware and the positive effect that it will have across the platform. If you have any questions, please get in touch with your Partner Manager who will be able to answer any queries that you may have.