Bottiger
Administrator
We received this message from our host:
Upcoming hardware move with downtime early 2/26 and or 2/27
Starting at 11pm PST on Tuesday, Feb. 25, and continuing in the morning, we plan to physically move machines between datacenters in LA, as part of important upgrades there that we are making to our infrastructure (including network infrastructure, by bringing our capacity to 100G for this location).
The night's activities will be fully scripted and reversible. We will be shutting down all machines and equipment at the current location, securely loading the equipment into a vehicle, driving to the new facility, unloading the equipment, re-racking the equipment, and turning everything back on.
This is a procedure that we have followed previously in other cities, including most recently in Seattle (earlier this month). We are flying in a highly experienced technician performing the physical moves and we are applying previous lessons learned to make sure that downtime is occurring on the lowest usage day, at the lowest-usage times, and will be kept to an absolute minimum -- including by performing in-advance prewiring, cable management, cabinet-side rail installation, router testing with circuit turn-up, and labeling at the new cabinet. We will essentially be sliding out the machines at the old facility and then in at the new one, without having to be concerned about tracking or moving cables or rails.
We are targeting a 6-hour downtime, but are not certain how long the procedure will take on Wednesday morning. It is possible that the procedure will extend later into the morning, such as to 7am or 8am. If there are serious problems and the maintenance has to be rewound, or if something prevents the maintenance from starting in the first place, we will end the event on Wednesday morning and try again the next day -- starting late Wednesday night and continuing into Thursday morning. We will be sure to post an update when the maintenance is finished or if more work has to be done the next day.
To be completely safe and eliminate any possibility of data loss, we recommend that all unmanaged VDS and full machine customers make and keep an extra copy of critical files prior to the maintenance. While we use RAIDs and it is unlikely that physical damage will occur to a machine during a move, it is always possible.
Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience that this maintenance will cause. We do not expect to need to perform a physical move like this in LA again.