Hello everybody,

     I am Jared, COO of Zetamex. I  writing today to inform all clients who have free accounts, that we’ve decided to discontinue our free services. We’re sorry that we have to quit offering free services but the company is growing to rapidly to continue to offer this, at this time. We may in the future offer it again, but for now we are shutting down the free services. Though with this bad news are do have some good. For all current free members, we are offering a one time upgrade from free to paid at a reduced price on our lowest package.

     Our Stander simulators offer, which is $20, is available to you at 25% off. So instead of paying the full $20, you will only have to pay $15. This offer will be available until the day after we shut down the free services, which will be December 17th. For anybody who is looking to upgrade from free to the speical offer. Then please submit a ticket letting us know you wish to upgrade before the cut off date, and then everything will be taken care of for you.

     Finally, we are also backing up everybody’s oars, whether you upgrade or not, and they will be avablie to download for those wanting their region oar. If you wish to get a copy of your region’s oar then please just sumit a ticket letting us know.

          Thank you for your time, and best wishes,

     Jared Shipp

UPDATE: Our support ticket system is located at http://support.zetamex.com/

[Resolved 12:38 EST] Restored main Route
We have successfully restored the main route, and are now adding host files to our servers in case the DNS issue should ever occur again the system will know where to pull assets without the DNS service.

[Started 12:30 EST] Problems DNS to Husky (central DB server)
We are currently setting up emergency routes to our backup DNS for some reason it did not kick in manually. We are going into all grids accounts that are currently effected by this issue. Please stay tuned here for further updates.

It has been a gueling week, and we are still not done. We have redone our entire infurstructure and there is still more work to be done on it. But we are happy to report that it is 80% complete, and most of our users haven’t notice but a few small issues, which we have already resolved most of them.

Over the next few days and weeks, you will see more information about our back-end come up on our blog here and about our servers. We want our residents/customers to know their data is on a very secure and redundant network of servers both in the cloud and in data centers. We have even taken the time to name all our servers after animals, just because it will make it easier for us to explain to people and reference them.

Click to Enlarge

Now to explain our entire layout, so lets start by explaining how when you first connect to any of our services.

1. When you first connect to any zetamex service, you are actually passing through our Cloud DNS service and CDN(the CDN is still not in production until we figure our a better solution for serving opensim through it). This service constantly checks all our sites, grids, and cloud servers making sure if the main instance is down to reroute you to the new emergency instance automatically without any notice to you.

(If your logging into a grid)
1. You now get passed to the cloud, where all our sites and grid’s login services are handled. This grabs everything about your account on whatever grid your on, then forwards the cloud instance sends your login response to the regions your teleporting too.

1 (ERROR RESPONSE). If you try to login to the grid and the cloud DNS detects the grid is down, it will immediately tell the cloud to restart the machine the grid is on and send you to the backup server so you don’t experience an error.

2. You arrive in our datacenter after being passed through our cloud instance, then you passed to the right server followed by correct simulator the region you want to be on. Your avatar only periodically pings in on the grid server on the cloud when you do IM’s, Teleports, and other grid related activities.

(If you just have a simulator hosted with us)
1. You teleport to your region in your grid you have the region hosted, and the grid will query the correct information from our cloud dns service that keeps track of all services incase emergency restart is needed.

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Now to explain what our Backup Datacenter is used for. (this is due to launch into production in the next month or two. Currently we do daily dumps into our storage provider for backups and run all our servers in RAID to be prepared for a hard disk failure.)

We use cloud storage and have two full really powerful servers on standby should any of our other servers experience a failure or issue. These two servers constantly mirror all data from our servers in our main datacenter. This allows us to restore service in the case of an emergency. Then these servers dump nightly to our private cloud storage provider who versions and keeps all data backed up and stored.

We will be letting you know more information soon as we finish the rest of our setup and introduce new features.

After our previous article about the difference in costs using Amazon, we were approached by another software engineer who informed us of a different cloud company. We have been doing some extensive testing with them, and have successfully found that we can help keep our costs down by setting up a hybrid setup of cloud and dedicated servers.

Who Does This Effect?

This change will only effect grid clients at this time, as our first wave of changes is to be migrating all grid clients Robust instances into the cloud for better scaling and performance. Their assets will be placed on our newly rendered dedicated database server, which will be constantly mirrored into our storage server and nightly dumps to Amazon S3.

What Does This Mean For Grid Clients?

The cloud service provider operates on 1Gbps pipes with Tier 1 locations in the USA and Germany. Currently our grid servers travel through pipes of 100Mbps, so expect much faster speeds over the 1Gbps. Another advantage to our cloud provider, allows us to make complete snapshots of your grids robust server, in order to duplicate them or restore them in case of a disaster.

Their will be brief downtime during the switch, but we are working on making the downtime for each grid planned. We will be contacting each grid provider directly, and making sure that we can coordinate things properly, for the best experience on both ends.

What Comes Next?

At the moment, we don’t see any benefit to bring simulators to the cloud for cost efficiency. We are continually looking into finding new and innovative ways to improve service, and keep our costs affordable. So that does mean, we are looking into finding ways to drive some of our costs down, and may result in plan architecture changes. However this is not now, and is in the future.

Zetamex is proud to welcome our newest team member, Jared Shipp. Jared Shipp is our new Support and Public Relations advisor. We have heard from a few people, that Zetamex may have a lot to say and talk about, however we get ourselves in a bit of a conflicts sometimes, and most the time unintentional. So this is where Jared comes in, and is now in control of making sure we keep our name clear and resolve the conflicts.

So without further to do, allow me to give you a bit of insight to our new team member.

You might have heard that a few days ago, Nara from Nara’s Nook, had changed to one of our new experimental solutions. Nara had an issue that many people may have and not even know, as they haven’t tried to take on large groups of people.

Nara started out with us, wanting to provide an interactive way for writers and readers to come visit and interact in a virtual world. Bringing books to life, so to speak. But when she started out, she decided to go with a standalone, as she wanted control over her users. But then she noted, after months of building up these huge and wonderful places. She began to outgrow the ability of standalone setup. This turned into me informing her, that she would need to upgrade to a full grid plan, to take the load off or move her regions into a grid.

This is a Grid Setup, notice how simulators are separated from the backend services allowing the regions to have more room to breath without the overhead of pushing everything through one single instance. (Image from Opensimulator.Org)

This is a Standalone Setup, it houses every single service under the same roof. This is great if you need a quick and simple solution for building. But for a bunch of users and heavy usage, it is not ideal. (Image from Opensimulator.Org)

As many people come to these levels, the price of running a grid is high, and requires a lot of work. Then she didn’t want to have to walk her users through someone else’s registration system, then not be able to go into the back of it and mange that user if she needs to. So I sat down and did some thinking, of what I could possibly do to make a middle of the road solution.

This is the layout of how the experiment works with Nara’s Nook (Image from my horrible artwork skills)

So the solution we came up with is what you see in that horrible demonstration I drew. Nara’s Nook now is only responsible for taking care of her users, inventory of her users, and the assets of her users. We thought about putting those in our own system, but realized that yes it will be duplicated when they enter in and out of ZetaWorlds, but we wanted our future users to know they have all their data in their hands and not just the grids.

As you can see groups and profiles are from the same system, merging these together allows us to make sure residents if they interact in ZetaWorlds or other places they can all take advantage of the shared service, no need to replicate these and waste space.

Next you notice that users simply check-in with the grid when they login and are then passed over to ZetaWorlds regions. This is where the new Nara’s Nook lives on ZetaWorlds. Users have their inventories and assets and they work across this divide. Now this is nothing too new, this is just us working off the hypergrid and a few other simple systems we created to help the process along. Now that Nara’s Nook only has to worry about the users, ZetaWorld’s simulators can take the hit from her amazing and wonderful regions.