million customers - infrastructure upgrade

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" We expect the server hardware and software at the base of

Xero will need to handle a

1,000,000+ customers in a few years time.



http://blog.xero.com/2013/01/infrastructure-upgrade-ensures-resiliency/

Infrastructure upgrade ensures resiliency

6 comments Published in Company News on 17 January 2013 by Duncan Ritchie
When you are growing a business as rapidly as Xero, doubling customer numbers year on year, and offering a service critical to so many people, you’ve got think well ahead. So we’re building and testing a new hosting environment for Xero that will ensure continued resilience and uptime and cope with this continual expansion.

We expect the server hardware and software at the base of Xero will need to handle a million+ customers in a few years time – that’s massive. Our existing hosting environment has been in place since late 2009 and has scaled from 15,000 paying customers to over 111,000.

We decided last year that a full migration to a new hosting environment is the appropriate next step rather than a further incremental capacity upgrade. This has allowed us to re-architect our platform to take advantage of new technologies, such as Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and scale in building blocks for easier planning, capacity and performance management.

As you would expect we have performed a considerable amount of testing and multiple trial migrations. We have rollback plans in place in the unlikely event the migration is not successful and we need to return to the current hosting environment.

The migration is scheduled for Sunday 27 Jan 8am to 4pm NZT (click here for your local time). The migration has a number of steps including final testing of the new hosting environment. We will bring Xero back online as soon as we are comfortable that it is ready, which may be earlier than 4pm.