4:35 AM EST Update - Network shutdown proceeded as planned. The network recovery process is beginning. Please stand by as all the services are restored. Please be aware that we will not be able to work any Urgent or High priority cases while the maintenance cycle is active. We will resume regular SLA at noon EST. Please keep an eye on the blog as we update it throughout the morning.

10:51 AM EST Update - Powergrid maintenance complete, network maintenance complete, cage “shuffles” complete. Moving on to application layer testing.

1:21 AM EST, The day after update – All services, networks, systems and operations back to normal. We will provide additional details later, we’re also lobbying for a day off

As we prepare for the massive upgrades coming this weekend we are obviously testing systems and making intermediate changes to the network. As a result, over the next 48 hours you are likely to see some latency in DNS query results which virtually impact all other services such as backups, ExchangeDefender, virtual servers and everything else thats being brought online.

While you are unlikely to notice any of these changes directly, if you do see slight performance issues they are probably related to the maintenance work being done on our end.

We are extending the maintenance cycle window for July 21, 2007. Our regular maintenance cycle is from 3AM to 7AM EST but due to the number of systems going online this week we are going to have to extend that window until noon EST. We will follow up with full details of the work being done but suffice to say it is significant.

If you are not familiar with our maintenance cycle activities do not worry, they are routine and they happen every week. Generally they are things you would expect – reboots to add more memory, storage, reboot for software patch installation, etc. At times there are other items such as electrical or network maintenance.

This particular weekend involves nearly all of the above plus a significant upgrade to our core infrastructure of ExchangeDefender, offsite backups and virtual servers. We’re bringing online 3 new data centers to top it off so we wanted to give ourselves more time to get everything done right.

We have scheduled an emergency maintenance interval on our Offsite Backup System network for Wednesday, June 6th, 2007. We are adding new hardware, upgrading some of the software and replication systems, adding more equipment to the mix and extending the reporting functionality to offer more reporting and branding functionality to you and your clients.

The backup network will be unreachable to the public between 10 PM EST – 11 PM EST.

Furthermore, we will be moving certain users to a more scalable network storage system. Because this change affects a very small group of users and involves a more extended downtime, you will be notified directly with some contingency planning and preparation as we intend to make the move in off-peak hours during the weekend when backup activity and change management is low. While you will have the ability to retrieve data during this interval, you will not be able to store more data to it.

Thank you for your patience. Backups and proper disaster recovery planning are very important to us and we realize that the offsite component is the most important one, after all, it is the one you use for compliance and in case everything else disappears, so we’re doing all we can to make sure that data is there when you need it.

Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now Corp, is presenting to two small business user groups tonight on a variety of technology and business subjects Own Web Now Corp is involved in. If you’d like to attend the access is free, details below:

Tonight’s presentation is free, live over the web and starts at 7:30 PM EST. It ends at approximately midnight EST. Here is the preliminary schedule.

7:30 – 8:30 EST: Exchange 2007 Overview (Level 100)

8:30 – 9:00 EST: ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey (Level 0)

9:30 – Midnight: Virtualized Services (Level 200), Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, and other tools we make (and why) that IT solution providers are using to make more money. These will be product demo’s, not sales pitches.

Is there anything else you’d like to hear? Since we’re pretty much inviting SBSers worldwide, is there something you’d like to see? See you tonight, livemeeting info below:

Meeting URL: Livemeeting Address

Meeting ID: D7QS3H

Meeting Key: bn6′%~P

All planned and scheduled maintenance for this weekend has been completed and finalized far earlier than we anticipated. The new power switches are in place, new servers have been activated, and our worldwide global mainteanance tasks have been completed. This window has not only addressed many problems we have had over the past three months but has also expanded our capacity and platform ability to deliver further ExchangeDefender and The Office Server products over the next quarter.

Please keep in mind that even though the maintenane window is complete there still may be some sporadic performance and service issues over the next 48 hours. All our data centers are fully staffed following the maintenance cycle while we evaluate and adjust our systems to monitor the network at the new capacity.

The next 72 hours will include series of six extensive maintenance tasks spanning three USA-based data centers and two EU-based data centers.

Maintenance Tasks

The first and largest maintenance task involves ExchangeDefender. First we will be adding more servers to the mix. This is a very routine task for us and is expected to produce zero downtime even on the nodes that are active during the transition. After the new nodes are online and older hardware has been swapped out we will proceed to roll out new policy systems which will speed up the daily email SPAM report generation, portal access, MSP control panels and higher-end reseller branding. These processes will continue throughout the weekend and while we will not have any downtime the mail release delays could be delayed up to five minutes. If your message is affected by this delay you will be given a notice when you attempt to release the message.

The second maintenance task involves TheOfficeServer dedicated servers and shared hosted services. We are expanding our portfolio to provide APC MasterSwitch remote reboot to address the complaints regarding Microsoft Windows Server patching problems over the past few months. The APC MasterSwitch software will allow you to remotely power cycle the server through a web interface when the system becomes unresponsive. In order to provide this service we will be gradually powering down and swapping power strips. We expect the downtime related to this task to take roughly 10 minutes. Our engineers will login to your server, trigger a graceful shutdown and move the power cord to the new strip. The downtime exclusively applies to the single switched power supplies, if you have a dual power supply you will not have any downtime associated with this maintenance task.

Own Web Now hosting control panels will be going offline for a period of five minutes during our regularly scheduled maintenance window from 7AM - 8AM GMT on Saturday, December 9th, 2006. This outage will not affect any services (dns, mail, web, databases, etc) but you will not be able to make any configuration changes during this window. If you do have an emergency maintenance issue please contact Own Web Now Corp through the trouble ticket support system.

Warranties

As always, all Own Web Now Corp maintenance tasks are fully scripted, practiced and load tested before being executed on the live production network. We have load tested each ExchangeDefender node at least 500 hours, each power strip has been placed to 80% load (manufacturer recommended maximum load) and held for 24 hours. We have full confidence in the hardware that is being placed into production.

Software Updates

ExchangeDefender has undergone significant changes in underlying infrastructure and reporting services to accommodate the global growth of both our network and our customer base. Although initially you will not see a visual difference in what we have changed you will notice a significant performance boost. This is directly related to the changes in the way we currently collect and build reporting for ExchangeDefender.

Finally,

Thank you for all your support, understanding and patience. Nearly all the changes we are making to ExchangeDefender, Own Web Now Corp and The Office Server systems are directly designed by the feedback submitted by you, our partners and customers. While many of you can appreciate that the recent instabilities have been caused by Microsoft’s diminishing QA of security patches, I personally want to make you aware that we are doing everything we can to both eliminate the problems and continue to work with Microsoft to make sure these issues are minimized in the future.

At no time do we lose sight of the trust you place in us to manage your systems and we’re doing everything we can to deliver on our promise and our message. Thank you for your business!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, CEO, Own Web Now Corp.

Welcome to the very first post of the Own Web Now Blog. My name is Vlad Mazek and I am the CEO of Own Web Now Corp. If you are our customer you have met or at least spoken to me.

Over the past two years I have been sharing insights into how OWN does business, what we do, what our culture is like, how we work on problems. Some of these posts were quite personal and were meant to give outsiders an idea on what it’s like to run a global company. Lately, we have seen and heard a need for a central place for us to communicate with you - our customer and partner – on what we’re doing.

So again, welcome to the OWN Blog. This is the area where my staff and I will be posting frequent updates about what we’re working on. Sometimes we will have announcements, sometimes we will have alerts, promotions, specials. On a more technical and business side we will talk about our core – technology behind advanced network infrastructure, SMB networks, hosting, virtualization, ExchangeDefender, spam defense, security issues, Shockey Monkey and more.

So welcome to the Own Web Now Blog. Please click on the link below to add us to your RSS reader and keep up with us. We look forward to working with you and as always, we thank you for your business:

http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog/feed/rss2

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE, Exchange MVP
CEO, Own Web Now Corp