Network Maintenance Announcement - 01:00 to 04:00 Sunday (US/Pacific Time)

This weekend, we will be upgrading our network at our LWDC location.

We are upgrading the network core at LWDC to two new Cisco 6504-Es with SUP720-3BXL supervisors engines, 10GigE, and 1GigE SFP cards. This will replace two smaller Cisco 1GigE switches. We are also turning up a new 10GigE connection between our SDTC and LWDC locations and one of the two planned additional 1GigE carrier connections at LWDC. It's a lot of new stuff!

The migration to this new infrastructure will require a few hours of carefully planned steps followed by testing. This will cause a few brief interruptions in connectivity as routing protocols do their thing and we perform testing after the cut-over to the new systems. Each interruption will be less than 1 minute.

Window Start: Sunday 7/31/11 01:00 PDT
Window End: Sunday 7/31/11 04:00 PDT
Impact: Customers at LWDC may notice a few short interruptions under 1 minute each. SDTC customers will be unaffected.

This message is being sent to customers who have one or more servers at our LWDC location. Customers at SDTC will not be affected.

As always, your feedback, comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. If you're thinking it, we want to hear it!

Sincerely,
Mike

Update: All work completed and tested successfully, and with time to spare.

Upgrading 6509s at SDTC

During our standard maintenance window this week (Sunday 02:00 to 04:00 PDT), we will be upgrading the redundant power supplies in the 6509s at SDTC to 6000W and adding a 4-port 10GigE card (Cisco WS-X6704-10GE) at SDTC.

Reminder: The Sunday maintenance window is when we do any work that has any risk, but is not expected to impact service. If there is an anticipated impact to service, we will send broadcast email.

Update: This maintenance went smoothly and was successful.

Power Systems Testing on 7/23/11

Our Data Center facility, American Internet Services, will perform a simulated "loss of primary (utility) power" transfer to generator power. This test will transfer the critical load to the emergency systems in order to verify the operation of the current emergency power systems solution. The data center will run for 30 minutes on engine generator during which proper function of each component will be validated. Electrical distribution will then be returned to the normal operational state.

SDTC Data Center - 7/23/2011 04:30 - 07:00 US/Pacific Time
LWDC Data Center - 7/23/2011 12:30 - 19:00 US/Pacific Time

This maintenance is not expected to be service impacting.

Update:The maintenance at SDTC has concluded successfully.

Update:The maintenance at LWDC has concluded successfully.