Wright PC Consulting, LLC

While most all web hosting providers, including mine, have a provision in their AUP or TOS that says that you, the consumer, are responsibility for backing up your data, I believe that as a service provider I owe it to my customers to do all that I can to protect their data. Backing up customer data both internally and off site is really the only way to fully mitigate potential disaster as the unfortunate folks that run their business out of The Planet’s H1 data center in Houston, Texas discovered when there was a large explosion in the electrical room that took the center off line for more than a week. While The Planet staff from the top down worked 24/7 to get the center back online, the update page tells the story of how difficult a task they had before them. During the downtime I followed the frustration of many whose data was held in powerless servers with no off site backup, were without a web presence, email and other services that make any hosting service’s world turn.

So, what do does Wright PC Consulting, LLC do to protect consumer data? Here is our current backup formula. While not perfect, it provides a pretty reasonable level of safety.

1. At approx. 3AM the cPanel backup script, cpbackup, runs an incremental backup of all customers’ home directories and cPanel configuration files and saves them to a dedicated backup drive where they are archived and rotated monthly.
2. When cpbackup has completed its backup, it starts a second script that “mirrors” the backup drive and sends it to a data center in another state through a secure encrypted tunnel using the rsync protocol.
3. Monthly customer data is burned to DVD and stored in a third, secure location.
4. For added security and by special arrangement, we will also mirror a customer’s email off site every hour.

These steps have proven to not only ease customer anxiety, but make they make restoring data, from a single file to any entire account easy.

Editor’s note: The following story is directly from the source and was not altered.

DALLAS, TEXAS (June 13, 2008) – MPower – which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful software for nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising – today announced that its solution has been accepted by SourceForge.net, the world’s largest online repository of open source code and applications, with more than 100,000 projects and 1,000,000-plus registered users.

“This is a milestone not just for MPower but also in the continuing evolution of CRM and fundraising software for nonprofits,” said Randy McCabe, Founder and CEO, MPower. “As excited as we were when we released our software as an open source offering in March, we are even more excited now because acceptance by SourceForge officially launches the real work, innovation and MPower community.”
Freedom for Nonprofits to Use, Innovate and Share

With MPower now fully available on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpower, nonprofits and their partners have easy access to the software’s source code so they can develop additional features and functionality to optimize constituent relationships and drive giving – in ways that work best for their individual organizations. MPower’s presence on SourceForge also creates a community of users who can easily collaborate and share their innovations.

To support developers, MPower plans to create forums (monitored and moderated by the company’s product development and management teams) covering such topics as adding new feature functionality and sharing innovations. Developers also will be able to track the incorporation of their innovations into the product. Additionally, MPower will provide Wikis on development best practices and coding as well as extensive product documentation.

“At NTEN, we believe that the more open software is, the better — the ability to customize, modify, and share data is key to really make software work for nonprofits and their unique business processes,” said Holly Ross, Executive Director, Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). “We are very excited to see so many vendors in our space embrace openness as a value and to learn that there is now one more choice available to the nonprofit community for additional development and innovation on SourceForge.”
MPower Available Under General Public License

Consistent with the dual licensing approach used by many of the world’s leading open source solutions (e.g., MySQL, Asterisk and Alfresco), MPower is available on SourceForge and through MPower directly under two licenses. Nonprofits may use and innovate with the software under the latest version of the GNU General Public License, or GPLv3, which is the most widely used licensing agreement for open source software. Under this license, nonprofits have the freedom to use and modify the software for any purpose to suit their organizations’ needs, and also share their modifications – all without fees.

“By adopting a well-regarded license, joining the SourceForge platform, and launching its community, MPower is making great strides in creating an open source community around its application,” said Michelle Murrain, Principal, MetaCentric Technology Advising, and Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). “I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations.”

Commercial users — such as other software vendors serving the nonprofit community — can use and develop MPower under another licensing agreement that does not require release of their modifications under an open source model.

MPower already was full feature, mature software used by hundreds of nonprofits, including some of the world’s most savvy direct marketers, when it became available as an open source offering in early March. Since then, more than 400 organizations have downloaded the solution from www.mpoweropen.com and the company expects that number to increase significantly now that the product is available for collaborative development on SourceForge.
About MPower

Dallas-based MPower provides the most open, flexible, and powerful suite of software and services for fundraising and constituent relationship management for today’s nonprofits. MPower enables organizations to manage important daily operations (including donation processing, fulfillment, event and volunteer management, call center activity tracking and major donors relations) and also capture and leverage key constituent data from all channels for building strong, lifetime relationships. MPower serves hundreds of nonprofits of all sizes with diverse missions and constituencies, including some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated direct marketers. For more information, please visit www.mpoweropen.com.

Early in the morning on Friday, May 23, 2008 power was lost at the HostDime data center that houses Wright PC Consulting, LLC’s leased server. While, that is not that big of a deal, there are both UPS and a Generator for such occasions, what followed is. For some it meant 16 hours or more of downtime.

Here is what happened and what is being done to prevent such future failures.

To our clients and business partners,

There are no words to describe how deeply we apologize about the downtime which occurred on Friday, May 23, 2008. The incident has created immense discontentment to our organization mentally and emotionally because of the love and dedication our team has to our entire community. Moreover, because we realize the level of damage this incident has potentially caused you. We know there is neither money nor words which will replace the losses that may have been experienced by each one of you. Our organization is forever in debt to you all for the frustration and grief endured. It is never easy in disasters, but many of you showed your support as we worked non-stop to get things back to normal. We want to thank all of you for your patience, understanding, and support during such a difficult time. In any case, a formal incident report of our investigation is what we wish to rightfully deliver to you. Below is the detailed summary of events as they occurred. Please note some of you may have not experience any outage during this, not all clients were effected but we wanted to keep everyone updated.

What happened:

At approximately 8 A.M. EST our data center experienced a surge followed by a power outage which lasted several minutes from our electrical utility provider Progressive Energy. The surge tripped our facility’s main breaker; this main breaker is designed to have a certain level of sensitivity and to trip in the event of a severe surge in order to protect the load (servers and critical equipment) from being burned. Immediately after this occurred, our generator automatically started up within a few seconds. Meanwhile power to our load (servers and equipment) was automatically transitioned from unavailable raw power to generator power by the automatic transfer switch (ATS), our uninterruptible power system (UPS) in conjunction with our battery set supply is supposed to automatically sustain continuous power to the load. However, it appeared this did not happen. In any case, generator power was indeed immediately available within the minute of the outage.

Immediately post the outage our engineers and electricians came on site. The diagnosis conducted revealed there was a fault within a battery string which is connected to the UPS. It is this fault that disabled the UPS from being able to fully sustain continuous power to the load meanwhile the ATS transitioned the facility to the generator power lines from the raw power lines. During this time a great portion of the data center experienced a sudden power loss which caused a myriad of servers to power cycle. Unfortunately, at times when some systems experience sudden power loss some require manual administrator intervention to get full function restored. Post the outage, our team immediately started working on checking systems and all servers that may have been adversely affected by the sudden power loss these experienced.

DimeNOC Orlando from HostDime.com on Vimeo.

What was done to correct the problem:

Our on call UPS maintenance technician along with our electricians and engineers immediately came together on site to conduct a thorough diagnosis and put together a plan of action to correct any and all possible issues.

While the age of the battery supply being employed was well within the manufacturer’s life span expectancy, the entire battery supply was replaced with a new set. In addition, our UPS underwent a thorough in depth inspection and all critical components were individually inspected and reconditioned as necessary. Lastly, the batteries and UPS were load tested before being re-employed to the overall power back up system to ensure 100% reliability. All this was completed within several hours of the incident.

Who was affected:

The power outage experienced was intermittent. However, once power was fully restored to the facility many servers required file system checks (FSCK), some power supply replacements, and a few others hard drive replacements due to excessive I/O errors. Unfortunately, depending on the space on the drive the system occupies a FSCK run time can range from 30 minutes to a nine hours plus (approximately 200 servers counted). Those that were worst affected are the systems that were having excessive I/O errors and needed hard drive replacements (approximately 12 servers total counted). Again, unfortunately, hard drive replacements may take 4-12 hours plus to complete depending on the space being occupied on the drive. Those that were least affected were servers that only required a power supply replacement (approximately 60 servers counted).

For those servers that experienced the greatest downtime was not due directly to power unavailability, but rather due to post sudden power loss adverse effects described above.

What preventative measures are being taken:

All critical power systems in our data center and loads were previously and are regularly inspected and maintained. This includes generator, UPS, breakers, etc. In fact, our UPS underwent an inspection and a maintenance service on the week of the 12th of May 2008. The service report came back showing the UPS was in good working condition as well as the battery supply set. The only advice made was to consider replacement of the battery set supply as these were approaching the last year of the manufacturer’s life span expectancy. Pro actively following up on the advice made by the maintenance engineer, a new battery supply set was ordered right away and scheduled to be installed this Tuesday May 27, 2008.

Unfortunately, the battery supply set is what ended up being the fault and ironically this is what was already schedule for routine replacement maintenance. It is difficult to state that more could have been done as the batteries were within their life expectancy limits but failed short during this situation. Something of this magnitude, unfortunately, could not be predicted and was already being addressed with a new battery supply set replacement as a proactive measure. Nonetheless, a new standard has now been adopted as we will be increasing the battery reliability tests schedule to be completed monthly. This will allow us to intercept any and all types of possible issues with any battery sooner and overall highly reducing the probability of a failure encounter during critical times.

Our data center employs a 500KVA UPS and a 500KW generator. This is a statement that can be further proved by the recent pictures and videos taken yesterday afternoon. If you are in any kind of doubt whatsoever with regards to this, we would like to kindly ask for the opportunity to disprove your doubt. The pictures and videos below are of our backup systems in place which have protected us from several past outages to the entire data center. We uncover what maybe some of you didn’t know was in place in our facility since day one so you can see that your services with us are secure.

We have been in the industry close to 8 years now and we have always tried our best to ensure 100% uptime to all of you. This is the first outage we experienced with this level of severity in our entire existence. It is not only our job but our passion to give you the best level of service possible. We do not want to use the misfortune of this unpredictable situation to be an excuse for the downtime experienced. Despite the nature of the situation, we accept full responsibility for the outage and we are ready to compensate you in anyway we can. We value your business relationship and the level of trust you put in us. We know many of you will have a desire to cancel with us due to the losses you have incurred and question our systems’ integrity. We ask you to please talk to someone in management before you make your decision as we do understand the level of importance this means to each one of you. We work in high a high volatile environment where anything can happen just like with any of our competitors, however, we will always, no matter what, promise to be here whenever any issue occurs with an open hand to help resolve it as fast as humanly possible. Misfortunes will always happen to the best of us, how they are handled and treated makes the difference. If there is anything at all we can do to help you minimize your losses please just ask and consider it done. Our awareness and commitment level has tripled as a company and you can ensure this has only made us stronger and more experienced as a company. It is not everyday people or companies can overcome such issues and have the support and loyalty that many of you have given us. If you wish to reach out to me personally with any concerns, recommendations, suggestions, venting, or ways we can compensate you, please email me personally at e.v @ hostdime.com. I will be happy to talk to you in person.

__________________
Emmanuel, CTO
Surpass Hosting

While annoying at the time of failure, I truly admire a company that not only accepts responsibility for what happens, but doesn’t point the finger at the suppliers, contractors and everyone else. Way to go HostDime/Surpass!