Reminder: ECi's Formal Weekly Data Center Maintenance Continues Each Saturday Night
Effective Dec. 6, 2008, ECi has instituted a standard weekly maintenance window every Saturday night from 9:00 PM CT until the following Sunday morning at 6:00 AM CT. This message is one of four reminders that we are conducting our weekly maintenance this weekend, Jan. 3-4.
Exception: As we announced earlier, ECinteractive® and is.D-Force® 2 servers will be updated with new quarterly catalog images and content this weekend, between 9 PM Central Time Saturday, Jan. 3, and 7 AM CST Monday, Jan. 5. The content load is in addition to ECi's standard data center maintenance tasks. As a result, the content load requires an extended maintenance window for ECinteractive® and is.D-Force® 2 servers.
In January, we will no longer announce this maintenance window, unless specific tasks require an adjustment to the timeframe.
Standard Weekly Data Center Maintenance Tasks
This weekly maintenance window will allow us to continue to provide proper regular maintenance to our hosted product infrastructure, including:
- applying the latest operating system patches (if available)
- running the proper weekly database optimizations
- making appropriate hardware changes to the infrastructure
- loading any software or Web catalog content releases
These standard weekly tasks are in addition to our nightly data backups and indexing.
Affected Products and Services
This weekly maintenance window applies to all products and services hosted on servers at the ECi Data Center near our headquarters in Fort Worth. This includes:
- Dealer Station®
- D-Force®
- Distributor Station® Maytech™ Edition
- eCOPAS™
- ECinteractive®
- D-Force2®
- ECi Private Supply Network (PSN)
- O/PUS® PSN
- 123Web!™
- Dealer Station® Xtended (DSX)
- ASP
These sites and servers are taken offline for specific tasks. As a result they will not be available, either on an intermittent basis or throughout the Saturday evening maintenance window, depending on the tasks involved.
Sites Down for Maintenance. During certain weekly maintenance tasks, you and your customers will be unable to connect to your storefront.
In Dealer Station, D-Force/D-Force2, Distributor Station, and ECinteractive, we recommend updating "Site Down For Maintenance" settings as needed to prompt any logged-in customers to complete their orders before the site is taken offline.
PSN Schedules. This weekly maintenance may also affect usage of the PSN.
If you have a scheduler set to run DDMS auto short-buy every day or otherwise transmit P/Os and other PSN queries during the maintenance window, these transmissions will not be complete temporarily until the PSN server is back online.
If you have the O/PUS PSN scheduler set to download pricing updates during that window, PSNControl software may not be able to find the files until the O/PUS PSN server is back online. However, rest assured that these servers will only be down for the amount of time required to perform specific tasks.
Upcoming Reminders. For the regular weekly maintenance window, we will send a reminder only for a few weeks. In January, we will no longer announce the maintenance window, unless a change is needed, as described below.
Possible Extensions to Maintenance Window
Sometimes, the process of loading Web storefront software updates and Web catalog content updates take longer than the scheduled maintenance window allows.
If these software and catalog updates require any adjustment to the Standard Maintenance Window, that information will be included in the update announcement before we publish the updates.
Sincerely,
Tom Gerrity, Senior Vice President
ECi Operations
Chad Lashley, Senior Product Manager
ECi Director of Hosted Solutions
Paul Lewis,
Associate Vice President
ECi Technical Support
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