Scheduled Maintenance
Early Monday morning (01:00-05:00 ET Monday January 12, 2009) we will be taking the site off-line to perform some much needed maintenance on our storage device.
The CBC.ca website uses a lot of disk space. All of the media, news stories, podcasts, etc.. add up. We store all of this information on device produced by a company called BlueArc. All of the web and application servers “mount” the BlueArc to serve the website content. There is approx. 3 terabytes of data that is used for the website. 3 Terabytes is a lot of data, to put it in perspective:
1 Terabyte would be equal to 50,000 pages of printed material.
1 Terabyte of seconds would be 32,000 years.
850 Terabytes of storage is used for all of the pages in the Google search index
2,250,000,000 Terabytes of data in 1 gram of DNA
What will I see during the outage?
Because we need to take the BlueArc offline to perform the maintenance, all of the pages in CBC.ca will not be available. However, we are going to be providing an extremely limited site (what we’re referring internally as the “skinny site”). This site will be extremely light-weight and only offer the latest news.
A preview of the site during the maintenance.
All other content will be unavailable until the maintenance is complete.
If you have any specific questions on how the BlueArc works, or why we’re doing this maintenance, please feel free to post a comment.
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I don’t know of any large media website that does this. I’ve never heard of such an outage. Never seen cnn.com or even youtube.com shut down for anything.
Youtube has regular maintenance windows as well, though I don’t know about CNN. You probably just don’t stay up late enough to see them (as is going to be the case for 90something% of the population for ours).
But if it bugs you that much, please call your MP and ask them to adequately fund the CBC. After all, you’re comparing websites worth billions with worldwide audiences, with a public service broadcaster that’s funded about half the average worldwide level. Maybe then we can afford more redundant systems.
I am very familiar with NAS products and most high-availability web companies have redundant repositories of their data so maintenance is fairly seamless to the outside world.
In government facilities however, it is very rare that enough money is allocated to do this, so it is unsurprising that CBC has to do this.
Oh yes, I have seen CNN and YouTube go down for unscheduled maintenance before when the scheduled ones were either disregarded or inadequate.