March 3, 2009 :: Planned network maintenance

[Jason]

The datacenter just posted a maintenance window for work on one of the Gold network backbone connections (Level3) on March 3, 2009.  It's quite possible this will be invisible to everyone however just in case:

Level3 will be performing a router upgrade on Tuesday, March 3rd that will affect traffic on our Level3 gold connection. All other gold and silver upstream connections will be unaffected.

Maintenance window: 3 Mar 2009 03:00:00 - 3 Mar 2009 05:00:00 Eastern
Expected outage duration: 15 minutes

If you have any questions, let me know.  Thanks

[Mark]

Just curious, on something like this, does it affect all servers?

[Jason]

Potentially.  The "watered-down" explanation is that our datacenter has two network options:  Gold and Silver.  Gold is their "higher-end" network though Silver is still impressive.  I'd have to doublecheck but the majority of our servers are on Gold.  To further break that down, each network has multiple carriers.  Gold has 6 GigE (1000mbit/second) backbones in place.  Level3 is just one of them.  They also utilize RouteScience which is a system that monitors traffic and can route around problems in realtime.  So in theory, one backbone *shouldn't* impact anyone however if your ISP happens to use one path only then technically you could face an issue if you are impacted.  It's fairly unlikely but you can never say never.  By and large, there should be no global impact.  These sorts of maintenance windows are fairly common and I've not seen any issues with the last several I've posted here.

Hope that helps!

[Mark]

hehe that was probably more info than I needed. I was just wondering how many servers you had on the same network.

[Jason]

Well, don't quote me (I'm confirming now in fact) but I think that out of our 9 current servers that maybe 1-3 are on Silver.  The rest are all Gold. 

The choice between Gold/Silver wasn't a "cost cutting" option.  At one point based on which server you bought, you landed on a specific network.  For the past several years, almost all new servers are on Gold as that is where they focus their expansion efforts.  So as we replace Cyclone (which I believe is on Silver) and one or two others, we'll ultimately be totally on Gold.

To make matters more confusing, they have just announced expansion out of Atlanta into a new dataspace in Dallas, Tx.   So potentially we could gain some redundancy there as well as different providers to that DC should I decide to use that dc in the future.

Nothing stands still in this industry!!

[Jason]

To confirm, we have one server only on Silver and that's a dedicated client.

All shared servers are in fact on Gold.

[Steve]

Thanks