The ManageBac Blog
May 18, 2010
We will be moving to a new hosting facility at RackSpace this Saturday, May 22nd, at 6 AM EST. The system will be temporarily inaccessible for up to 5 hours until 11 AM EST.
We recommend that you finish saving your evidence & activities before that 5-hour window begins at 6 AM EST.
April 2, 2010
As CAS Manager has evolved into ManageBac, our focus has shifted towards addressing three core problems that have been at the top of IB Coordinators’ minds:
(1) Reducing postage costs by submitting EEs, ToKs & World Lits online (vs. having to mail them as hard-copies)
(2) Submitting exam registration details in bulk to IBIS via the Plan worksheet (vs. having to manually register students individually & collect hand-written paper forms)
(3) Allowing online Moderator access to the IA records (vs. having to store & mail them as CDs, Labs, PSOWs)
As a prerequisite, the key IA forms from the Handbook of Procedures have been fully integrated, but this is the critical next step, and these are our three top priorities for 2010.
We need your help to make this a reality. Please help us by completing this 5-minute online survey: http://managebac.wufoo.com/forms/ib-coordinator-survey/
The survey results will be shared with the IBO, and released publicly after being aggregated.
March 21, 2010
If your school has been selected for CAS moderation this March, you will be able to provide the IB with read-only access to your ManageBac account and to the CAS records being submitted for moderation.
We received this suggestion at last year’s IBAP conference, and this process was approved by IB Cardiff earlier this month.
Once you have received notification from the IB with the three randomly selected students, you can complete this Authorization Letter, which gives us permission to release your records to the IB.
You can also submit a support request, and we can send you an electronic version of the authorization letter via EchoSign.
We hope to have more online submission updates as the IB finalizes its e-Coursework interface.
March 19, 2010
Early this morning at 6:19 AM PST, our systems were preemptively taken offline for 58 minutes in order to conduct emergency maintenance. A power circuit breaker feeding our server rack was not functioning properly, so our systems were shut down, in order to allow data center staff to safely replace the power circuit breaker.
Our second slave database had a duplicate set of records saved, and there was no data harmed, but our systems were inaccesible for nearly an hour. We apologize for the inconvenience and disruption to your schedules.
Over the summer, we will be migrating to a distributed load balancing system, which will guarantee high availability and greatly reduce the probability of unexpected downtime.
Our year-to-date uptime has been 99.85% including scheduled maintenance, and we will work hard to ensure that we end the calendar year above 99.9%. Thank you for your understanding.
March 2, 2010
February 22, 2010
By clicking the green Help button in the upper right hand corner, you will be able to easily submit support requests, browse our new online guides, or get answers using our live help chat.
Our new online guides allow you to avoid having to open up PDFs, so you can easily access tutorials directly. You’ll also be able to download PDF versions, if you would like to print out specific lessons.
February 15, 2010
CAS was the spark that lit the fire! We hope this video inspires you to create, to take action and to serve…
February 12, 2010
For CasLog schools, this transition will be seamless. Your user accounts and data will be migrated over on the evening of February 19th, and you will continue to enjoy access to CAS functionality at no cost for all of your current students in both the class of 2010 and 2011.
Why are we combining the two services?
Combining the services will allow us to continue enhancing the ManageBac platform. It will provide us with greater scale, which will bring us closer to fulfilling our mandate of sustainably serving the entire IB community’s technology needs.
Ultimately, the contributions made by schools were not sufficient to support the CasLog service. This exciting amalgamation means that existing CasLog schools can continue to benefit from the convenience of an online CAS management programme.
Why does scale matter?
Scale matters in technology because it directly correlates to progress. We measure our success by the aggregate efficiency gains that we deliver: the time saved, the paperwork eliminated, and the improvements in workflow.
Everything we are building today is a pre-requisite to the inevitability that your postage costs will be eliminated at some point in the future.
This is why having the official IB forms available online, providing direct access to students, eliminating the need for manual data entry, etc. are all essential steps towards the future.
CAS was the beginning, but it was by no means the end.
What does this mean for existing and new ManageBac users?
ManageBac will remain the same for all existing schools. CasLog schools that have logged in, added students and have active accounts, will have their records seamlessly migrated over and those schools will enjoy free access to the ManageBac CAS facility. Schools registered on CasLog, but not yet actively using the system will be offered a free 3 month trial with Managebac.
We will be organizing online training sessions during the week of February 22, 2010 to provide you and your colleagues with personalized walkthroughs of the ManageBac service.
Please feel free to contact us directly at info@managebac.com if you have any questions.
February 10, 2010
We hope this post will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the infrastructure we have in place to ensure a reliable and secure user experience.
It will address a number of questions that we frequently receive:
Reliability and uptime are essential, so let’s get started.
Accessing ManageBac
When you type http://school.managebac.com into your browser, your computer sends a Domain Name System (DNS) request to determine the corresponding IP address (e.g. “173.203.105.123”). This is the unique identifier for our servers akin to a phone number in your address book.
We use more than a dozen name servers around the world to ensure that whenever you type our address into a browser, you will be routed to our servers reliably and efficiently. In addition, we have a failover and monitoring service that operates 24/7 ensuring 100% DNS reliability.
Our Hosting
Once your requests have been received, our servers return the pages, files and images that you have requested. The key thing here is reliability and speed. On average, our servers return requests to you in less than 160 milliseconds (~1/6th of a second). Next, depending on your location, the data travels across land and sea to reach your computer (this typically adds an additional 500 ms to two seconds depending on your country’s network).
Our servers are primarily hosted in the RackSpace Cloud in a data center with redundant high-capacity power feeds, UPS power backups, fully redundant HVAC systems, controlled temperature and humidity, fire threat and detection, 24/7 critical monitoring and manned security. We are also secondarily hosted in Montreal, Quebec in a similarly outfitted facility.
Performance Management
We use NewRelic Rails Performance Management to monitor and analyze our application response times. This allows us to pinpoint areas that are slow or that require optimization. It also automatically notifies us when any part of our application slows down.
Average Response Times
We make use of extensive caching throughout ManageBac. Caching allows us to pre-load sets of information (such as summary data of CAS activities, or long lists of students) that would alternatively have to be loaded at the time of your request.
You can think of it like a LEGO castle, instead of waiting for your request to start building and putting the LEGO pieces together, we do this in advance, so that your castle is ready instantaneously.
Backups and Data Protection
Murphy’s Law dictates that, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. While we are not pessimistic by nature, we plan for the worst. Servers go down, hard drives break, and accidents happen, which is why we have three layers of redundancy.
The first layer involves a redundant database that duplicates all of our records in real-time. For example when a new CAS activity is added, it’s name, dates, supervisor information, etc. are all duplicated across both databases.
Secondly, we have daily disk image backups, which are automatically done at midnight EST.
Thirdly, we encrypt all of the disk images and store them off-site three times each week. These encrypted backups are stored on Amazon S3’s distributed storage network ensuring that if a hurricane, terrorist incident or act of God were to occur, your data would be safe and out of harms way.
Lastly, we have an extensive set of soft-deletes in place throughout the system, so that if you accidentally delete a file or set of records, we can restore them for you, typically within 48 hours.
Monitoring
Our servers are monitored night and day in 30 second intervals, and we are notified via e-mail instantly if any issues arise. Since inception our server uptime has exceeded 99%.
Thank you for your reading about our infrastructure, we hope that this has allowed you to better understand the steps that we have taken to ensure that ManageBac is reliable, responsive and secure.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact us directly at info@managebac.com.
