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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.

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.

We’ll conduct grid wide maintenance on the voice servers on Monday morning, 14 July 2008, between 2:00 AM PDT and 5:00 AM PDT. Each voice-enabled region will experience a brief downtime (under five minutes) as the individual media server supporting voice for that region is restarted.

A handful of individual regions may experience audio interruptions lasting five to ten seconds for a period of a few hours following this maintenance period, as audio load is balanced across the voice grid.

We’ll update the status page as work progresses.

To improve the Second Life experience, we’ll be upgrading database hardware this coming Wednesday, 2 July.

The upgrade is scheduled to begin at 7:00 a.m. Pacific, and to take a maximum of an hour.  During that time, logins, new account registration, and the land store will be unavailable; however, residents who are in world will not be asked to log out.

We’ll report progress during the upgrade on the status page.

Updates on current grid service status and issues are available on the new Second Life Grid Status Reports blog page, http://status.secondlifegrid.net/.

Are you following the Second Life Grid Status Reports? If your business, your event, or your time with friends may be impacted by the Grid Status, we want you to have all the information we can get you, as quickly and easily as possible. 

We’ve been posting Status Updates mixed in with a variety of posts on other topics. We realize that many of you don’t want to have to hunt through the blog for needed Status information, so in an effort make it easier for you, we’re following the tech industry standard and moving that information to a Status page. 

Starting today, we’ll be collecting all the Second Life Grid Status Reports onto that one page. Now, you can check for an update without having to scan through all the other blog posts.

You can also subscribe to updates on your mobile phone using Twitter, or with an RSS reader. 

Yep, get your Second Life Grid Status Reports, wherever you go.

Subscribe!

Now you can subscribe to the reports, and make sure they’re sent directly to you.

* Get updates sent to your RSS reader. 

* Subscribe with your mobile phone and you can get Twitter updates while you’re out and about. Go ahead, take that meeting, go back to class, do your shopping, take a walk, get some other work done, and when the next Second Life Grid Status Report comes out, you’ll hear about it.

https://twitter.com/SLGridStatus

RSS: What is it? Status Reports sent Directly to You

• RSS? The BBC offers a good, simple article that goes right to “How do I start…?” 
• If you’d like to get more technical, try Wikipedia 

What is Twitter? Get Status Reports on your Mobile Phone or Computer

• With your Twitter, you can subscribe to updates directly on your mobile phone (or at your computer.) 
• Twitter FAQ
• Twitter Japan, for better service in Japan
• 3 Tips to Get Twitter on Your Cellphone for Free

Quick Links: Second Life Grid Status Reports

• Second Life Grid Status Reports
• Direct link to the new page which collects all Status Reports, so you can easily read the updates.
• http://status.secondlifegrid.net/

Subscribe to the Second Life Grid Status Reports via Twitter

• Want to subscribe to updates with your mobile phone? You can do so with the Twitter feed.
• https://twitter.com/SLGridStatus

Subscribe to the Second Life Grid Status Reports via RSS 

• Grab this RSS feed

[Resolved at 10:50pm Pacific] Our Support Portal is back online!

[Updated at 10:10pm Pacific] Maintenance is in progress. — Frontier

As reported earlier this week, our support portal will be offline for system maintenance tonight, Saturday, 26th April.

Our software supplier has reduced the length of the downtime from six hours to three, from 9:00pm-Midnight PDT.

During that time, the support portal will be unavailable for chat or ticketing services.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you.