The Information Technology department would like to thank our colleagues for your patience with us as we perform maintenance on our systems. We’d like to tell you a little about what we’ve been working on.

On August 26th, we replaced our oldest VMWare ESXi host with a brand new and more powerful machine. URAC maintains three of these hosts, which are responsible for the computing tasks of all our virtual servers, as well as to provide us with high availability (If one of our hosts were to fail, the other two can pick up the slack.) We plan to replace these on a rolling basis, with one being replaced each year. 

We also upgraded the network fabric which connects our hosts to our storage area network, allowing for faster connectivity. Our storage network switches have been replaced with brand new equipment, and new ports have been installed in our existing hardware to take advantage of new speeds.  These upgrades allow our virtual servers to communicate over ten times faster than they previously communicated. To give you an example, inter-host server migrations which previously took around 40 to 60 seconds are now performed in a fraction of a second.

We have further upgrades planned for this fall. We plan to upgrade what we refer to as our “core” or “backbone” switches. These switches are the workhorses of our network here and provide interconnectivity between our storage network, our servers, our users, and the Internet. We will also be installing a dedicated connection between URAC and CallTower, our phone provider, to provide high availability and a more direct route to improve call quality. We hope that this, in addition to our earlier upgrade of our primary and backup Internet connections, will allow for a faster experience for all.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or concerns.