June 8th Conference Call Notes

Here are the minutes of our June 8th customer conference call.

The call starts with general chatter while everyone joins.

• At 18:55 into the audio file Tom begins the update on C2.

• C2 will incorporate a major change in switch topology. Tom explains this change in detail. Slices on C1 were unable to communicate with other slices on C1 via the external IP addresses. This has been resolved with C2 architecture.

• At 28 minutes Tom talks about the C2 cabinet and how all the hardware is in place including cabling. The architecture will allow us to have less scheduled downtime.

• At 29 minutes: IPMI Card. All servers in C2 have an IPMI card and allows us to do KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) and access the servers from anywhere in the world. It’s literally if we were sitting at the machine with a keyboard and monitor.

• At 31:28: Customer Question: Have we done performance based testing to prove or disprove any of the Xen restart bugs on C2? Tom’s response: We are using Xen 3.1 release, Red Hat cluster 1.04. LVM and CLVM have been revised several times and may contribute to a solution. We have also done a lot of burn-in testing on all of the servers. Our performance testing will begin shortly.

• At 38:40: Customer Question: What was the follow-up to the load balancer outage? Tom’s response: We made an update through the http app which is something we do on a regular basis. After the previous load balancer outage Tom had made some changes to make sure our fail-over was working properly via the config file and was not synced to the GUI interface. We will diagnose why the config and GUI are not synced during our next scheduled maintenance.

• At 44:30: We will upgrade C1 with improvements that will be incorporated into C2 to include Xen upgrades and hardware upgrades.

• At 46:20: Zaadz is our first customer to purchase a private cluster. This will be built with all of the C2 upgrades.

• At 48:40: Power usage requirements for C2 are currently consuming 18 kw of power and it’s not even under load yet. Pictures are available of C2 on our blog.

• At 50:30: Tom addresses a customer suggestion to upgrade our ticketing system to include SSL. We are looking into new ticketing systems.

• At 51:31: Lance mentions how Engine Yard is sponsoring several Ruby and Rails conferences in the upcoming months both in US and in the EU. We are also bringing on Evan Phoenix to the team.

• At 53:00: Edward is a recent addition to the team as a system architect. Tom describes how Edward has contributed Engine Yard. Tom also talks about bring on Evan Phoenix and his work with Rubinius. Ezra contributes his excitement regarding Rubinius.

Call ends at 1:06:54.