FurnishWEB has been successfully moved to a bigger, faster server with the latest server software upgrades. The move took a lot of planning & testing. Over the weekend, we shut down FurnishWEB from 8:00 PM Friday EDT to around 12:00 Noon Sunday EDT while copying & testing all the programs & data. After a couple of hiccups, we brought the new server online for full system testing on Saturday which went very well. So we cut over to the new server late Sunday morning.
FurnishWEB is running great on the new server and our users will notice the improvement. We're very pleased with the transition, we're proud of our team, and we know we're prepared for expected growth this year!

If you've ever purchased a new PC and gone through the "joy" of moving all of your programs and data from your old machine to your new machine, then you've experienced a taste of moving a server application to a new server. The major difference is that when you turn it on for thousands of users, everything HAS to work. I just met with a friend that bought a new laptop during the 2009 Christmas season and until today had not yet successfully transferred all his MS Outlook mail folders to his new computer. He's pretty good with computers ... its just not that simple to transfer your stuff.

Over the weekend we executed a plan that moved FurnishWEB's main applications and all our clients data to a new server. A bigger, faster, cooler server with significant performance enhancements for our existing users and plenty of elbow room for a bunch of new FurnishWEB manufacturers. The new server is not only a nicer piece of equipment but also consists of newer versions of several software programs: RedHat Linux, Adobe ColdFusion Application Server, mySQL Database Server.

All aspects of FurnishWEB were tested on a sampling of data: website, reports, uploading photos & files, downloading photos & files, email notifications, 25 FTP connections, data refreshing, data exporting, and much more. And we needed to notify our clients, their sales reps, and all our retail users of the week end plans because FurnishWEB would not be available during the cutover. It was a busy week!

Then came the weekend. Starting Friday at 8:00 PM EDT, FurnishWEB was turned off and our data transfer began. Our lead developer and application engineer baby-sat with the entire process. He watched the progress as 53 databases of over 41GB of texts, photos, and files were copied across the network from an old server to the new server. The application was ready to test around 11:00 PM Friday night ... but something was wrong. We successfully tested this process earlier in the week but decided on a slight change when moving ALL the data to speed up the process and it quickly became obvious the 'tweaking' the process ..... well it was causing us some issues. The databases were not working at all and it appeared our shiny new server was pretty broken. Ugly!

After a couple hours of Google'ing and head-scratching, our lead developer discovered the problem was with file permissions so he implemented his suspected solution and fixed the problem. By this time, it was after 12:30 AM so we called it a night to get rest before a day of testing on Saturday.

It took all day Saturday, but EVERYTHING was successfully retested with the system fully loaded with all our clients' data. With system testing behind us there were a few final steps to accomplish before the GO/NO GO decision. It was a GO! But it was late, after midnight again. Implementing the cutover would wait until Sunday.

Late morning Sunday afternoon, we made the cut over to the new server. Our whole team has been periodically checking on things today and all seems to be working well. We'll send out a notification late tonight or early tomorrow morning announcing we're back online. Mission accomplished.

Our team is tired and happy at the same time. It was a lot of work but we're now on a great new server that will support substantial growth.