FJ Linden here, to report on the latest Ongoing Updates from the Grid.

As I promised in my first post, this will be a regular monthly communication to keep all of you up to date on our efforts to improve grid stability and reliability. I’m finishing up my 3rd month at the Lab and have some significant progress to report.

I’m happy to report that we have an approved plan to move away from VPN reliance. We’ve finalized a design and chosen facility and equipment partners to build and deploy a private fiber optic ring to interconnect our datacenters. “LLnet” will be the designation of our private network and we have established an aggressive timeframe to activate it. I’m pushing hard to bring LLnet online by the end of this year (’08), and begin a phased migration off of the VPN’s immediately after. Given the amount of traffic to move, I would estimate completion of this project by February or March of ‘09 at the latest. So we have a light at the end of the tunnel on one of our biggest stability issues.

In addition to freeing us from our dependency on VPN’s, LLnet will bring additional redundancy, as we will have a means to keep our datacenters from being isolated, if a Level 3 outage were to occur. We’ll also be building a fully routed architecture that will allow us to deploy BGP and finally add redundant Internet providers and improved traffic performance. This is a major infrastructure investment, but one that is long overdue.

I’ve included some timeframes in this posting, but do so only to show that we are pushing as aggressively as possible to get the network operational, if timeframes slip I’ll make sure to communicate that as well. I think it’s important that we start making hard commitments and push aggressively to meet them. I know everyone is tired of talking about the VPN problems, and you can count me in that group! We’ve now got a solid plan in place and are implementing!!

I also wanted to highlight a few additional infrastructure projects that are targeted for completion by the end of 2008.

  • HTTP Dataserver: The goal of this project is to migrate all C++ mysql traffic from mysql protocol to http(s). Not only will this further free us from VPN dependency, it will also allow us move off of MySQL wire protocol over the WAN and better enable tracking and monitoring of queries. We’re about 50% of the way through this effort and expect to be complete by the end of the year.
  • Agent Inventory Services: The goal of this project is to provide a RESTful web services interface to the agent inventory. This is one of the projects in flight to address the numerous issues that Residents experience with inventory, and is designed to simplify communications and provide better reliability. Phase 1 of this project will be finished this quarter and should have a positive impact on perceived inventory loss due to unreliable messaging.

    • So, I’ll continue the monthly updates and, while I’m sure there have been individual issues since my last post, we are making real progress towards our primary goal of grid stability and reliability. As always, the proof is in our execution of these projects, not the promises.

          

    Original post by Frank Ambrose (FJ Linden)