In early January, we will be rolling out a major infrastructure upgrade to our database that brings you a faster and more reliable Assistly experience. Here are the details.

When:
          Saturday, January 7th, 2012
          7 PM to 1 AM (next day), Pacific Time

On Saturday, January 7th, 2012, we will be making a substantial upgrade to Assistly’s database infrastructure to improve your experience. During this time, the Assistly Agent and Admin will be unavailable for up to six hours. Your customers will still be able to reach your Help Center. We are confident these enhancements will result in faster performance and increased reliability.

What is Happening?

Assistly understands that the integrity and availability of your customers’ information is vital to your business operations and our own success. As a Salesforce.com company, we are deeply investing in the infrastructure that supports your business.

To deliver on the promise of Assistly, we will be upgrading the technology that supports our main database. We will begin the maintenance on Saturday January 7th at 7 PM Pacific Time. Based on our global usage statistics, Saturday evenings are when Assistly has the fewest number of agents working in the system. While we realize there is no perfect time for extended maintenance, we anticipate this schedule will have the least impact on our customers. We hope to make it up to you with an improved experience and we will do our best to minimize the disruption.

In order to fully safeguard your data, we will be taking Assistly offline for four to six hours. We hope to complete our work within four hours — but our number one goal is to safeguard your data, so we are allowing ourselves a full six hours if necessary.

How do I Prepare?

During the maintenance, you will not be able to log in to Assistly or use the Admin or Agent interface. Additionally, the API will not be available. However, your customers will still be able to reach your help center. For more information, see Your Help Center – Now available during Assistly Maintenance.

During our maintenance windows, your Help Center will be available in “read only” mode. You can take some steps to improve your customers’ experience with your Help Center while it’s in read only mode. For more information, please refer to the help article Configuring your Customer Help Center for Read-only Access.

How do I Monitor the Progress?

We will provide updates as we begin work and as we move through the process on our @AssistlyOps Twitter account. Please bookmark this page and visit it to follow the progress.

Details: Building a Better Cloud

We feel this is an essential upgrade to Assistly and well worth the minor inconvenience of an extended maintenance window.

As way of background, everything in Assistly (including customers and cases) is stored in a high-performance database that is accessed hundreds and thousands of times per second. The speed and reliability of this database is the fundamental building block of your Assistly experience, and it is stored on high-speed hard drives provided by Amazon Web Services — the same web services that Amazon.com uses to provide their online retail storefront, as well as their streaming media services. Amazon Web Services are used by thousands of companies and have become an essential part of the Internet cloud infrastructure.

As a Salesforce.com company, Assistly is able to deeply invest in infrastructure improvements for your benefit. As our growth has accelerated, we’ve started to push against the limits of the basic Amazon Web services. Amazon, as a partner of ours, has identified a high-performance upgrade which allows us to move our database layer to a bare metal direct connect solution. This will increase Assistly’s performance to keep up with your needs, while still allowing us to leverage the power, economy and depth of Amazon’s services.

Thank you in advance for your patience while we perform this critical maintenance that will improve the performance and reliability of our service.