|sonance|network|technews

The big Zentrix change marks the shift from old unsupported white machines to new supported black machines. It completes a process of hardware upgrades started about 18 months agoby the Sonance tech team.

Before, we had a smattering of white machines that were continually giving problems in late 2006. Although they pretty much performed flawlessly during 2007, we suffered from ever-present fear as these old constructed-from-old-parts machines rumbled and rattled on, always treating the next day as their last.

Now we have two primary systems in place: a new big black machine called Bonanza which operates as the host for lots of virtual machines, located here in Funkfeuer, and a remotely hosted machine in Germany for reliable mail transport.

Sonance is now in much better shape to offer serious services, as at least the hardware is solid. We still have a lot of software re-organisation to do, we want to gradually strip all the services out of the old core machine (Zentrix) and move them into separated virtual machines for independence and robustness.

Also, hardware will continue to grow. It looks like over the next year we will field another big VM machine, and possibly two. This will give us the ability to failover for critical VMs. We also would like to purchase an independent file server for the data, giving us even more flexibility. Budget willing!