

Update of Waterloo LEARN (Desire2Learn) - aren55555
http://uwaterloo.ca/learn-help/news/message-provost-regarding-learn

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josephby
From the company:

"As part of our major investment in next-generation infrastructure project
within our SaaS facilities we began in the fall of 2012, many changes to our
environment were required as part of our migration into this new environment.

One of these changes required a sophisticated process of migrating data to our
new enterprise storage solution. We made a decision that it would serve our
clients best to migrate this data over time, with the help of our vendors
using technologies purpose-built for live migration. This methodology
prevented the requirement for long, multi-day maintenance windows due to the
large volumes of file data that need to be transferred. Effectively this “file
virtualization” technology (“ARX”) would allow the seamless use of both source
and destination storage during the migration with no impact to users.

The issues currently being experienced have been determined to exist within
the ARX technology. We are currently seeing different impact to different
customers. For customers whom we had yet to begin the migration of their data,
or for customers for whom we had completed the process, we were able to remove
the ARX solution from their environment, resulting in a complete restoration
of service.

For customers who are in midst of their data migration, the ARX cannot be
removed, and we have initiated a separate restoration process that applies to
a portion of customers. This process involves a configuration change to the
internal format of metadata within the ARX. This change has shown to have a
positive impact on the clients for whom this process has completed. However,
this configuration change takes time to process, and we are targeting noon EST
today for completion with clients seeing ongoing improvements as it makes
progress."

Full contents here -- <http://desire4community.com/all-hands-on-deck/>

I admire the fortitude it takes to try doing a live migration for something
like this; in hindsight, I'm sure everyone agrees that a well-scheduled
maintenance outage isn't the worst thing that can happen. Here's hoping that
all of the schools recover quickly. Good luck guys.

