Lets try and remember that if you read the entire statement, they have said they are doing this as a trial, and no firm decision on the fate of tuesday maintenance has yet been made.

Though honestly, i was playing for pretty much all of what would have been downtime on Proudmoore and didn't notice any kind of lag, so it is certainly possible that weekly scheduled downtime will be a thing of the past. Fingers crossed.
 

Tobold are you being a greench so soon after Christmas?

I worked with an IT shop once, and it took them a few years to get one of the company's systems maintenance windows streamlined from 5 hours to 1. Even then people complained. :)
 

It is a lot easier to update something as expansive and intricate as World of Warcraft while the servers are offline. It saves them from having to tip-toe around users who are currently playing.
 

They have been switching the servers to new hardware, right?
 

What they mean by performing maintenance is they swap out the Raid Hard Drives (which have a limited lifespan under heavy strain) for new ones. The previous maintance of 5+ hours meant they were swapping the data to drives that needed to be re-stripped with the raid data, however now they must have improved their data-backing system so that it is truly hot swappable and they can just toss on the new mirrored drive.

Companies like Symantec Ghosting can offer this type of service, but Id imagine that Blizzard uses its own ghosting and mirroring software.
 

Better the devil you know in some respects. Living in NZ, US offpeak time is right in the middle of my primetime, and even when playing on Frostmourne, a so called Oceanic server, rolling restarts frequently happened during our raids. Not so hot.

If having an extra night per week (and maintenance night meant a 11pm or 12pm bedtime, which is not that bad anyway) means more rolling restarts in US offpeak time then ... no thanks?