Dear Engine Yard customer,

We originally planned a large SAN system upgrade this weekend on our shared clusters, but we’ve heard from many of you in the past few days and we’ve decided to change our plans.

We’ve heard that:

1) We did not give enough notice for the scheduled SAN backplane replacement.

2) The scheduled maintenance was going to occur too early in the day.

3) The next few weeks of December represent an important time for many of your businesses.

4) You’d prefer to continue as-is through December with a small risk of SAN problems, instead of having a long maintenance occur right now.

So, we are going to wait until January to perform the maintenance on all shared clusters.

To reduce the risk of SAN problems right now, our staff has enacted a plan, with the assistance of our SAN vendor, to reduce the risk of catastrophic disk failure.  In the event of a disk failure, we will take the unit with the failed disk offline, and replace it individually.  This should result in less than 30 minutes of down time on a per-incident basis.

We want to convey that although the additional steps we have taken achieve a reasonable risk reduction, no step outside of total replacement eliminates the risk entirely, and that’s what we need to do in January.

Following the confirmation of a new maintenance period with our SAN vendor, our staff will be alerting you at least 30 days before the date of the rescheduled maintenance.  At this time we expect the date to be in late January.  (Engine Yard partners will receive additional advance notice as well.)

I want to personally thank everyone who communicated concerns with our team over the last few days.  We hear you loud and clear!

Thanks again for your support on this issue — we are anxious to see this SAN problem behind us forever and it’s now just a matter of scheduling the right time to replace the backplanes on the affected SAN units.

Sincerely,

–Taylor Weibley

Dir. of Support