Secure Dragon LLC: An update on 2015 and where we're going this year.

It's been a while, so here's an exciting e-mail to give you a peak into the future of Secure Dragon (and it's an awesome one).

First off, we apologize for the lack of communication (although if you follow us on Twitter you've seen some nice little tweets about what's in the works this year). Basically we've spent most of January testing out new servers, RAID cards, and SSDs (spoiler alert: Samsung 850s out perform Crucial MX100s).

SSD Powered OpenVZ Nodes

So I'm sure you've guessed it already (or maybe you follow our Twitter and already knew), we're slowly making the switch to 6x SSDs in RAID10 with this new round of upgrades. Eventually all of our OpenVZ nodes will be replaced with SSD powered nodes which will also include newer server hardware with Dual 6 Core Intel Xeons (24 threads total), more and faster RAM, and newer RAID cards.

Our Florida OpenVZ node is the first 100% SSD node installed in our environment boasting 6x Samsung 850s in RAID10. Clients on our current OpenVZ node have received an e-mail regarding this migration today.

Our New Jersey OpenVZ node is the next on the list to receive the SSD upgrade (6x Crucial MX100s in RAID10), but this was mainly due to us switching data centers and we felt that replacing the hardware was the easiest process to keep downtime to a minimal. Clients in our NJ location have already received an e-mail regarding this.

We do not have a schedule in place for our other locations, but when we do you can expect an e-mail from us when your services will be affected. We will try to upgrade the servers in the order of node population but other factors may be involved. We do not have an ETA on when we expect these upgrades to be complete or how often we will be upgrading the nodes so please do not contact us regarding this as we do not have any answers at this time.

As a result of these upgrades, migrations to and from our FL and NJ nodes have been disabled until the migrations are complete. We have also increased our pricing for additional disk space from $0.05/GB to $0.20/GB due to the much higher costs of SSDs.

1Gbps Ports

We recently made an announcement regarding this, but I wanted to touch on it here so everybody is aware. As of January 22nd, 2015 all VPSs come standard with 1Gbps ports (excluding our Atlanta location, but there is a ticket open to fix this). You can view the announcement here for the specifics (including our AUP update): https://securedragon.net/clients/announcements.php?id=509

New Wyvern Alerting

The 22nd was a busy day for us, another announcement that was made was that we've added some alerting to Wyvern to help clients keep closer tabs on their VPS activity. Now Wyvern will open a ticket when a VPS is either rebooted or throttled by our automated systems. Here's a link to the announcement with more details: https://securedragon.net/clients/announcements.php?id=508

Wyvern Security Audit

With all of the updates we've been pushing, we wanted to make sure Wyvern was as secure as possible for our clients and their data. On January 3rd, 2015 we had an external security audit performed on the Wyvern code and we had it back online and fully patched within a few hours. You can read the announcement here: https://securedragon.net/clients/announcements.php?id=508

A big thanks to Vlad C. from SafeOrNot.net for taking the time to go over all 28,000+ lines of code.

New Jersey Data Center Change

As previously mentioned, we will be migrating our clients out of COLO@'s Weehawken, NJ location to Constant's Piscataway, NJ Tier 4 data center in the near future. There are multiple reasons for this switch, but here's a rough outline of why we are doing this:

1) Our NJ location has been plagued with network outages over the past few months and our data center has been unable to provide us a reason for these, sometimes 3+ hour, outages. Uptime is important to us and our clients.

2) Constant offers some features that will allow us to expand our services in the future so making this change now will allow us to move forward with these expansions sooner.

3) Cheaper bandwidth. Now that we offer 1Gbps ports for all clients, we expect to use more bandwidth and in order to prevent us from reducing bandwidth or increasing pricing we needed to find locations with cheaper bandwidth. While cheaper usually means lesser quality, Constant offers a much better blend of bandwidth so hopefully the network performance will remain the same or be better than COLO@'s.

4) In addition to Constant's 100% uptime guarantee, they also offer a 0% packet loss guarantee which is just as important as being online all of the time.

5) Lastly, we've been trying to diversify our infrastructure so we're not overly reliant on one specific provider.

We have received some comments and concerns regarding the quality of COLO@'s services and we would like to ask that you do not interpret this migration away from COLO@ to reflect negatively on them as a company. We plan to continue using their services in other locations for the foreseeable future.

Drgn.biz Update

We've given Drgn.biz an update so it's easier to use and provides more information about our infrastructure so clients have a single site they can visit for quick stats about us. So now you can find test IPs and test files, run network tests, view our latest Twitter update, and see our server statuses all from one website. Visit http://drgn.biz today and check it out.

2015

2015 is shaping up to be a great year already and hopefully we can continue providing the service you expect from us. As always, we're working to improve your experience in any way that we can so please feel free to contact us if you wish to discuss things we are doing and how we can do them better.

-The Secure Dragon Staff-
Secure Dragon LLC.
https://SecureDragon.net