When the hurricane struck, as many of you know now, it took power out for almost every area from the Florida Keys up through Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. Many people wanted to know why we didn't just get a generator to power the site operations, and that's a good question. We actually found generators available, and there was no Diesel in the area for many days that was pumpable (no power), and was not being used for emergency services (such a hospital, police, fire, and rescue etc.). So we could find a generator and we had no way to fuel it.

We had previously stated that the servers were in the process of moving to the new datacenter at the NAP of the Americas. However they did not complete the provisioning for us this past weekend as intended. Since diesel fuel is now starting to become more available in the area as some basic services return, we felt it best to not wait, and we are now running the site off an industrial generator which has the capacity to sustain the server power requirements. It is still our intention to move the servers to the new facility regardless of when the power returns as soon as possible. The generator allows us to operate and to plan the move and to ensure we have adequate server coverage for the move. More details on when the move will happen will be forthcoming.

We have received a number of emails stating concern for the staff. We would like to thank you all for your kind thoughts. The conditions in Florida have not really improved much in the last few days. Most of the area does now have running water, however it is not potable water (so is not drinkable). Power is still out for most of the area, but sections of the city are starting to get power back. Some gas services are starting to return (which is how we can now run the servers on diesel).

We will do our best to continue to provide you with updates as we return the site and the OMP business to a working state.

Our Primary goals at this time are the following:

Maintain site operations

Move the site operations to the Network Operations Center

Re-establish OMP Business Operations (some of which are working now, some of which are not, for example we do not have all our bandwidth back yet)

Thanks again for your continued support as we work through these issues.

Regards and thanks,

Brett Cramer - CEO and Founder of OneModelPlace.com,
Stuart Burden - Founder and Creator of OneModelPlace.com,
and all of the OMP Staff

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Dear OneModelPlace.com members,

Thank you for all your kind wishes and support. We wanted to re-assure everyone that the staff is safe, and the OMP offices, datacenter, and servers were not damaged at all by Hurricane Wilma, which has devastated the Ft. Lauderdale area. Wilma hit the area harder than is being reported on the news. There are widespread outages of essential services, such as power, water and gas; these are almost non-existent throughout all of Broward County (the greater Ft. Lauderdale area). Estimates range from 3 to 4 million people who are without power and water currently. Most regular phones do not work, and almost every cell phone tower in the area was either damaged or has run out of its battery backup, so communications are spotty at best and non-existent at worst.

Our goal is to return services as quickly as possible. Estimates for the return of power to the area and to the office are upwards of 6 weeks. Over the past few months, we had completed our server migration and contingency plans (prior to Wilma), and were in the process of executing these plans. We had already established working contracts to host at the NAP of the Americas (a Tier 1 hosting facility in Miami, as well as plans to establish a remote secondary operation in Atlanta as a backup). We were in the advanced stages of setting up the appropriate provisioning for power and space in this new facility when Wilma hit. For those who are interested, we already had some of our existing services running off what is known as a 'backhaul' network from our new location within the NAP, and those were live on the site (for example we have 5 image servers for OMP and image server number 5 was live on that separate network and had been running live for 10 days or so).

The plan was to phase our move to the NAP over the following few weeks, and move all the servers (we have 15-20 servers which now serve OMP, which consumes in excess of 100mbs of bandwidth sustained), and the NAP is one of the few facilities in Florida that is capable of instantly expanding as we need it due to their extraordinary capacity. However, since there is no information from area officials regarding when power may return to the region, we have negotiated emergency provisioning with the NAP of the Americas facility and they have committed to have their facility ready for us this weekend.

Unless stable power returns to the current facility (which would be the best option), it is our intention to move the entire server architecture to the new facility as soon as possible and re-establish the OneModelPlace.com service as soon as we are physically able to move and set up the servers and infrastructure (even if power does return it is still our intention to accelerate the planned move, since the provisioning for power and space will have been completed).

It is important to understand that doing this large a move all at once is almost never smooth. A server infrastructure as large as Onemodelplace.com is always hard to move. We have received a number of inquires about why we don't just move the servers, however the power and bandwidth requirements alone for OMP are so substantial that it makes a simple move of the servers not viable to most facilities, which is why we chose the NAP of the Americas. So OMP may be a little rough for a few days as we tune the servers and routers to the new network. We appreciate everyone's patience and realize that this is a very frustrating thing for our members (especially for those who do not understand the extent of the damage that Wilma left). It is frustrating to us also. We will be doing everything we can to mitigate any future outages with additional locations and servers.

We will release more details as we have them.

Regards and thanks,

Brett Cramer - CEO and Founder of OneModelPlace.com
Stuart Burden - Founder and Creator of OneModelPlace.com