One of the downsides to running your own network and managing all your own hardware is that you have to fix it when it breaks!
As we've mentioned several times in the past, we have been investing a lot in new hardware over the past year or so.
However, even with shiny new hardware, you can still run into problems.
So the other day we noticed some serious issues with one of our shared hosting servers - Gorlois (I really must explain the etymology of our servers at some point!).
What had happened?
Basically the hardware RAID card was not working properly. Instead of improving the disk performance it was actually bringing the server to a grinding halt.
Why?
While the hardware is supposedly supported it's just not that good.
Solution:
Move the entire server to another machine.
We normally have a couple of spare machines lying around, so we were able to migrate the entire server over to different hardware yesterday evening.
There may have been some downtime - about 10 minutes or so - for clients on the affected server, but as the IP address didn't change there won't have been any oddities caused by DNS caching etc.,
The new server is using a different RAID card, so hopefully we won't see that one developing "issues". Some geeks may find them "interesting" - as a hosting provider I could really do without them!
So there you go ... If your site is hosted on gorlois.blacknight.ie enjoy the new hardware - it's now a real monster of a machine.
