When Astral Internet was launched in 2001, our mission was to offer excellent customer service to everyone. This mission was later modified to “Offer unparalleled service and more speed than the competition” and is still in effect today.
For this reason, we are proud to announce that the equipment used to propel your sites will be more powerful than before.
We have invested over 105,000$ in order to update our equipment. This investment permitted us to update our current servers, as well as add new servers to our infrastructure.
Relentless Updates
An operation of this size needs a lot of preparation. To achieve this, the operation was planned almost a year in advance. During this planning, we have:
- Ordered a dozen pizzas (over Zoom meetings).
- Encouraged local breweries.
- Spent a few sleepless nights to test the configurations.
Once the planning was complete, it was time to act.
Adding New Servers
We began the operation with the addition of new servers. Each added server would require a perfect configuration to be able to join the others.
- Firstly, each of the servers required around 12 hours of configuration.
- Then, they needed to be connected physically in the datacenter. Every server has 2 distinct electrical entries and over 8 network connections.
- Finally, once they are well connected in the datacenter, they must join the existing server cluster. This is what creates the base of the Cloud which hosts your sites.
A single error during these steps could cause major issues to the entire infrastructure. Consequently, we need to double-check and even triple-check our work.
Open-Heart Surgery
All of our current servers already present in our infrastructure were also updated. New processors and more memory for everyone!
This operation was as delicate as an open-heart surgery. Each server was removed from the datacenter and opened. Then, with surgical precision, Martin (our president) extracted the heart of the servers to replace them with one being up to 10 times more efficient.
New Algorithms
New servers and new processors, it is already a huge augmentation of power, but it is not enough for us to be satisfied.
So, we changed the algorithms used for virtualization. This change implies a full reinstallation and reconfiguration of every server, after completing it at the previous step. For those who wonder why we didn’t do it the first time, the answer is simple. The risk of having issues was less likely by proceeding this way.
It Wasn’t the First Time
In 2017, we had already made a major upgrade to our infrastructure. An investment of approximately 500,000$ was made to exponentially improve the speed, security, and redundancy of our equipment.
To make a quick summary, here are the highlights of the modifications made in 2017:
- Purchase and configuration of two Fortinet firewalls.
- Change of storage equipment to SSD disks.
- Integration of new, more recent, and efficient servers.
- Equipment duplication to ensure redundancy.
An Endless Job
Although we have just completed this big update, we are already starting to analyze the next big step.
We have a data center dedicated to research and development. In the latter, we are already trying new technologies in order to find the most efficient.
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