Original publication date: June, 2007
Softshare hosts 76 Softshare ‘CATS programs on a group of internal servers that are solely dedicated to ‘CATS databases and operations. Currently, these servers reside at Softshare’s Santa Barbara headquarters, living side-by-side with the servers that we use to run our e-commerce operations. But not for long.
Softshare has decided to give the Softshare ‘CATS servers a brand new home at a Time Warner co-location facility on the outskirts of town. We anticipate that these facilities will prove more reliable for server hosting than Softshare’s facilities. Not to imply that Softshare is unreliable; it’s the frequently scheduled power outages in our neighborhood that have persuaded us to make the server move.
Since moving to our new downtown offices 18 months ago, Softshare has endured three scheduled power outages (apparently the electric company is upgrading service in this area). Three power outages may not sound like much, but when hosted databases and network operations are involved, it’s a lot of effort to keep things running smoothly.
The big server move is scheduled to begin in late July and continue into early August. We’ll literally be driving the servers across town during this timeframe, but because we’ll be rotating in temporary servers, the transition should be seamless on your end.
And since we’re talking about servers in the context of reliability, now is a good time to reiterate our standard backup policy. As initially discussed in the November 2005 issue of Softshare Times, Softshare performs daily backups. Each daily backup is kept in a separate file and is stored for one week. In other words, a backup performed on a Monday evening will be overwritten with the following Monday evening’s backup. A backup performed on a Tuesday evening will be overwritten with the following Tuesday evening’s backup, and so on.
You should be aware that these backups are full backups, not incremental backups. If a single client and their associated activity sessions were inadvertently deleted, Softshare wouldn’t be able to use a backup file to restore those specific records only. The most recent backup file we would have available would represent the prior day’s database, meaning that all data entry done since the prior day would be lost if that backup file were restored. (If it was absolutely necessary that those inadvertently-deleted records be retrieved, and restoring the prior day’s backup file wasn’t an option, Softshare would be able to do so, but it would require considerable effort and would be billed at $150.00 per hour.) If you ever need to restore a prior day’s database, let us know as soon as possible to ensure that (1) we still have that day’s backup as it is only kept for seven days and (2) you are losing as little data as possible that has since been entered.
In addition to daily backups, Softshare also performs weekly backups that are then stored off-site for security reasons. If the Time Warner co-location facilities were to experience a fire or some other type of damaging event and the servers as well as the daily backups were damaged or corrupted, the weekly backup file would be used to restore your database. Depending upon when the damage occurred, you could lose up to a week's worth of data.
In the event of a disaster that affects all of Santa Barbara, you could lose your entire database. If you’d like to take steps to protect your database from an area-wide catastrophe, you can request that Softshare replicate your database on a server that is physically located at our Amsterdam data center. The fees for replication in Amsterdam depend upon the size of your database, but are roughly 50% of your current hosting fees. Your data would be replicated across the ocean once daily, so you may potentially lose one day’s worth of data and experience downtime while we bring up the back-up servers in Amsterdam. However, you would be protected from a true catastrophic disaster. If you would like to learn more about this backup option (available only to Softshare-hosted sites), please contact your sales representative.