LInkedIn announced the move over the weekend in a blog post by senior director of operations Stefan Apitz
UPDATE: As of the posting of this story on Tuesday morning, the LinkedIn site was back online and functioning normally, but several subsequent tests on Tuesday have turned up 404 “page not found” errors for the site’s homepage. The comments on this story would seem to suggest that the problem is persistent.
According to several posts made to the LinkedIn Twitter account (@linkedin), the team is “hard at work with the data center transition as they fix site issues.”
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Business-focused social networking site LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) made the move to a new data center in Los Angeles over the weekend, a move that included some scheduled downtime as well as some performance issues on Monday, according to reports.
The company announced via a blog post by senior director of operations Stefan Apitz – over the weekend – that it would make the move, which would include several hours of downtime on Sunday evening (the site’s lowest-traffic time), as it switched over to the new location.
The last major data center move by LinkedIn was the opening of a new site in Chicago, back in 2008. In the time since, says Apitz, the site’s user base has nearly tripled, placing some serious demands on its infrastructure.
“It is time to add an additional, more robust data center,” writes Apitz, “that not only helps us handle the increasing traffic load on our servers, but to also provide more redundancy in case of an emergency. Our team has been working hard for months on the design, subsequent build out and the deployment of the many database and application servers that make up our production site today.”
The announcement doesn’t include the precise location of the data center, or any specifics about whether it is leasing the space, and from whom. According to reports at the time, the Chicago data center expansion was into an Equinix facility.
According to several sources, including the comments section on Apitz’s blog post, the LinkedIn site was suffering some performance issues Monday, December 13.
An update to the blog post said, “We continue to tune our site and optimize site performance this morning, following our recent cutover to the new Los Angeles data center. Thanks for your patience during the transition.”
As of Tuesday, the problem seemed to have been fixed, as the site – at least from where I’m sitting – is running normally.
While migrating infrastructure is always tricky, and the impact can range from inconvenient to disastrous, LinkedIn appears to have made the migration with only minor performance issues.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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