Company
The Release of Astinus
by Kalleen Marquise on Apr 13, 2021
We are proud to announce the completion of the move to our new server, Astinus! Thank you for your patience the last several months as we transitioned our partners to a more secure, faster, and private server environment.
Astinus
The word Astinus (ass-tee-nus) comes from the character Astinus of Palanthas, the head librarian and great historian in the Dragonlance book series. The character was known for recording and protecting all history, just as our new server environment will do.
Security
One of our biggest priorities in moving to a private server environment was to protect your data and make it more secure than ever. In our new server environment, every partner will have their own tenancy. This shift from multi-tenancy to single tenancy will give partners more control over their security needs. Single tenancy allows for us to tighten or loosen security based on individual requirements. For example, some of our partners have specific encryption needs, that will now be easier for us to facilitate.
Reliability & Performance
Migrating to this new server environment also enabled us to have more redundancy in the backend. Server redundancy refers to the amount and intensity of backup, failover or redundant servers in a computing environment. Not only are backups more frequent, but the network itself is more resilient. For partners, this means lower down time, better experience, and better customer service. Partners should notice that report processing is faster, and overall, your system should run faster. We will have more control over memory and processing, and be able to customize these needs to each individual partner.
Scalability
With more developments in the open source community, this move will set ByWater Solutions and our partners up for future growth and expansion, as we match external growth with internal growth. By making this switch now, we can easily transition to other environments as trends and needs change in the future. This network will be much bigger and, at minimum, our partners should experience 10 times the network bandwidth they're used to. This makes response times faster and eliminates a lot of network congestion.
A part of our server migration, was to better support our partners who use built-in email notifications. This process has been completed and you should see improved email communication with patrons. If you want to learn more about why we transitioned our email services, you can find an in-depth blog series here:
Thank You
At the end of the day, we are grateful for the tireless work the Systems Team has put in over the last several months. Not only are they working to return normal support tickets as quickly as possible- but they were working late into the night and early into the morning migrating servers.
Along the way, we deemed them our heroes and names and super powers were administered.
Liz, The Glacier, of the Systems Team, is known for her grinding and endless persistence to make problems more clear (clarifying problems) and come up with clean resolutions.
Jesse, Captain Speed, of the Systems Team, is known for his flash speed- not just running- but getting tasks done super fast. He is also the Captain of Calm in times of crisis.
Mitch, The Magic Man, of the Systems Team, who spearheaded most of this move may not always be seen, but the efforts of his work can be felt. Like magic, you come in the next day and progress was made behind the scenes!
We are thankful for them, and all the others on the team that pitched in and helped with this massive undertaking!
Read more by Kalleen Marquise