DEAR MEMBERS,

A very major failure has occurred within the emails storage system.

Our central Storage Area Network started showing degraded performance at around 6pm Wednesday evening. As our systems depend on this system to store your data, incoming email and access requests began to pile up, causing the system in general to overload. Usually such an incident is a temporary affair and service may be restored within minutes. It seems however that our technicians who maintain the SAN have been unable to pinpoint the exact cause. The SAN supplier, HP, is now on the case and providing ongoing top level expert assistance.

Meanwhile our priority is to restore access to your accounts. We have a two phase plan:

  • Phase 1 
    We will restore your accounts to allow NEW email to arrive. You will be able to login and view new email and reply to it. We expect this to be available by lunchtime today.
  • Phase 2 
    We will then begin the restoration of your email data. This will take somewhat longer as we have to move nearly a terabyte of data back into your mailboxes. We will have a more precise estimate of completion time once this begins.

Meanwhile we will release in the next 30-60 minutes an emergency forwarding interface to allow you to forward your incoming email to another account of your choosing. This will be available from this front page.

We will keep you updated through the website News section as progress is made. Please understand that we are working as hard as possible to respond to this unprecedented situation and are executing our Disaster Recovery Plan (which began last night) with the utmost urgency.

Please accept my deepest apologies for this inconvenience. As you know we take a failure of this magnitude very seriously. This SAN system was believed by all to be a very reliable one and has good standing in the industry. Unfortunately, we seem to have had considerable bad luck in receiving one that has not performed as reasonably expected.

If you have an emergency and must have information from a particular email please email help@aluminati.net and we will attempt to recover this data for you on a case by case basis. Please try to only use this for actual emergencies so we can help those most in need.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Watts
Managing Director
Aluminati Network Group