Thank you for joining us for the Monday network infrastructure upgrade.

It has been an interesting week at Own Web Now. Following the major hardware swaps during the Thanksgiving break we have found several new pieces of hardware that really did not live up to the standards or the tests we put them through. What can you do, when you work in IT for a living you work to swap out disappointing upgrades.

Now on to something serious. In the past two weeks we have found two critical issues that have already been addressed:

Offsite Backups - We have discontinued the use of 1.5 TB drives due to the high level of failure during production. We have also isolated a single point of failure in our offsite backup strategy with the ways we were storing our security database and our file storage. This resulted in having to move approximately 30 customers from one grid to another and restoring their backups in reverse (from replication partners to masters) which is a painstakingly slow process. Over the past week we have also worked to remove this limitation from our systems and our enterprise backup.

ExchangeDefender - Last Thursday we had several messages with extended delays during which we have discovered several important problems. First, ExchangeDefender should not be used to route inbound mail from your own network to our inbound network. Please rely on a local SMTP service because our inbound network is configured not to expect local mail appearing on an external interface. Seems like common sense but apparently some users have their SMTP servers set to route using DNS lookups instead of using local SMTP servers or connectors. ExchangeDefender inbound network is not designed to function as your SMTP server, in fact quite the opposite - mail for local domains appearing from outside the ExchangeDefender network is put through further scanning as a possible forgery. This is either a flaw or a designed security feature depending on who you ask.

Week Ahead

This week we will be rolling out two additional Exchange 2007 networks to help address the demand for the service. We will also be provisioning a shared cluster hosting concept and expanding storage allotments for our FTP and file storage services.