Originally by: Wynteryth Fett

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Edited by: Wynteryth Fett on 25/06/2010 22:44:38
A few things:
Whomever said that moving stuff like this is normally a 4 day turnaround doesn't know what they are talking about.

Next, CCP provides a service. We pay for that service. The amount of downtime that they take during the course of a year is ridiculous compared to what other corporations do for processes that are significantly more complicated than this game.

For the person quoting the Number 12 of the EULA, that is standard lawyer BS. Any GOOD company strives to exceed those standards as those should be the absolute minimum. The only time the servers should be down is if the facility was damaged/destroyed in a fire or some other natural disaster is affecting the building/city that the server is located in. Otherwise, there is no excuse.

Now, that being said, let me give you all some background. My profession has me involved with clients who have server locations that range from as small as 10 servers to as large as several thousand in a single site. It's my job to help them plan for disaster recovery, which is severely more complex than a standard move such as the one that CCP just performed. My clients typically have an N+1 set-up for their sites in terms of redundancy, a 2N redundancy ON-SITE for their PDUs, Servers, RAID arrays and Battery rooms, and either a 2N or 2N+1 for their power needs (both for onsite and off-site power generation). For a product such as EVE with over 300,000 active clients, there is no reason for them to not have a 2N system set up with separate RAID array systems for the player databases and game databases.

The reality is that CCP could have had the new infrastructure up and running for days, if not weeks, in redundancy with the old system, and it would have just been a matter of shutting off the old system and we'd have been none the wiser. The fact that it went so poorly tells us many things. One, they didn't plan well at all. Two, whomever they were using to house their servers and whomever they are using now really isn't good in terms of service. That means that we, the customers, are going to have continued issues with game play and server downtimes.

<SNIPPED>

I'll be honest. Whomever was in charge of this move should be fired as they failed in their job. CCP should also count themselves lucky because, had their clients been corporate in nature, CCP would have been out of business years ago for such shoddy service.

So, the questions that should be answered by CCP are:
1) Why wasn't the new equipment and one system set up weeks in advance to prevent this extended down time?
2) Has CCP taken the precautions necessary to ensure the "database errors" *wink wink* don't re-occur going forward?
3) Does the new server location have the infrastructure to ensure that the system doesn't go down due to something minor like a bad PDU or short-term loss of power?
4) Are the servers with the new equipment set up in at least a 2N redundancy so something as simple as hardware failure doesn't shut the game down?

If they provide answers to that, then we, the customer, can feel better going forward.

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