From the archive · 27 August 2009
2009: the year that changed everything
Three data centres running at once, the “barcelona2” host debuting Windows Server 2008 R2, MDaemon 10.10 and a week-by-week platform chronicle.
After receiving Windows 7 on 6 August 2009, and Windows 2008 R2 on 11 August 2009, in their final (RTM) versions and licensed by Microsoft, we got down to work in our laboratory environment to evaluate the product before starting the upgrades of our systems.
As of today we already have our first non-critical production server running under Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter, dedicated to the backup systems, the DNS server and the server monitoring Elstir’s network and machines.
This server is the real environment we will monitor and optimise before proceeding with the migration of all our systems to R2 over the coming months.
The notable new features cover Web Platform, Virtualisation, Scalability and Reliability, Management and the relationship with Windows 7.
That summer, everything overlapped: Houston (where we doubled the servers’ disk capacity in July), Amsterdam at full throttle, and the landing in Barcelona at Nexica’s data centre — the very same one where, many hardware generations later, our platform still lives today. In between: weekly updates to MySQL, Zend Server, PHP, Perl and ImageMagick published one by one, Wincache and SQLIO benchmarks, and the migration of our own website. All documented in this archive.
Today, in 2026
Barcelona stopped being “the other location” and became home. Today the whole platform lives here, on our own AS49008 network and in a centre certified ENS High — the highest level of the ENS, Spain's national security framework.
elstir data centre →