This weekend we’ll be performing some upgrades and maintenance on our Cerb4 hosted helpdesk infrastructure.

We’ll be:

• Adding more RAM to the database machines.

• Adding non-RAID storage to the main hosted machines. This will take a lot of burden off the local disks as we start doing even more frequent backups.

• Migrating some helpdesks to balance load inside the network.

• Upgrading everyone to the latest stable version (currently 4.0 Build 593 602).

The hardware upgrades should be rather quick (minutes if all goes well), and that is the only planned major downtime during this maintenance window.

Moving helpdesks around our network and upgrading them to the latest version will take several hours cumulatively, but each helpdesk should only be impacted for a few minutes. Your hosted helpdesk IP may change but your URL won’t (so ping it and update any firewalls, etc).

Thanks to those of you who are hosting your helpdesk with us! We have a lot of exciting improvements on the way (distributed hosting for large scale helpdesks, cloud-computing/virtualization-ready Cerb4, off-site backup deliveries, and more).

Update 15-May-2008: Our new expected upgrade window is Friday, May 16th from 9:00PM to 10:00PM Pacific Time. This maintenance period should have even less of an impact on Cerb4 hosted helpdesks than planned since we already did the helpdesk upgrades this afternoon with the release of our latest security patch.