Jun 16, 2018 | Planned Work
Following from the upgrades in London and Manchester the final upgrade will be to our Huntingdon Data Centre. We have a number of planned changes over the coming week.
1) Individual Rack Upgrades
A number of our hosting racks have older cisco switches in them – we are planning on upgrading them over this weekend / early over the coming week. We expect this will cause a number of short breaks to service to individual servers. We will have the new rack in place in each rack before and then simply move the patch cable for each server to the new rack. Once all servers are moved to the new switch – the old switch will be removed.
2) Power upgrades
In preparation for the new core switch units we will be adding additional power to our core racks. This should not cause any issues – However our specialist engineers will be working near the main power distribution board as such this should be considered at risk. All work will be carried out outside normal working hours
3) Core Router and Switch replacement
Once the prep work has been completed we will be replacing the core routers and switches with much faster and newer models. During the replacement process this will mean there are short periods of downtime as services and moved to the new switches and routers. We will create a separate ticket for this work as soon as we have a definate date – however we wanted to provide some notice – we anticipate this being later in the week or over the weekend – it will be outside standard working hours.
We will update this ticket as these progress
Feb 15, 2018 | Information, Planned Work
Our supplier has identified a potential issue with a fibre bearer which holds some backup links to our Huntingdon Data Centre. They are making a config change to correct this overnight.
As these are backup links it should not have a significant impact but there is some chance of packet loss as the link drops / returns as the network re-converges.
We will update this post as the work progresses
Feb 9, 2018 | Planned Work
We have noticed a small issue on a switch port connected to some leased lines. The issue is not currently service affecting – and needs a simple one line config change to resolve.
As there is a very small risk to a few seconds of packet loss during the change this will be performed tonight
Only leased lines connected to a single bearer in Telehouse North will be affected and we don’t expect more than a few seconds of packet loss during the change
Any questions or issues please contact support via the normal means
Feb 1, 2018 | Information, Planned Work
Following the rapid growth on the Merula network we have been planning a major upgrade to our core switching platform to Juniper devices. These will allow us to dramatically increase the capacity between sites and add further stability to our network. Over the coming week, work will take place to introduce them into our network.
This will in due course lead to some limited downtime as links are migrated. We will update here with specific slots for this but wanted to provide some initial details for this work.
Any initial questions, please email support via the normal means.
Feb 1, 2018 | Information, Outages, Planned Work
Further to the outage yesterday and the corrective work by the carrier we will attempt to bring the link that failed back into service this evening. If all works to plan there may be a brief network disruption while the network reconverges. If the link fails again we will remove it from the network and continue work with our supplier.
The link was brought on line approx 12:30am this morning – However the previous issue re-occurred. This has been raised to the supplier who believe this is resolved this correctly now, We will plan a further maintenance shortly to bring the link back into service. In the mean time there is no reduction to service – but there is a slight reduction in resilience to our Manchester PoP
Feb 1, 2018 | Information, Outages, Planned Work, Unplanned downtime
During planned work deemed low risk by a supplier they managed to inject a loop into one of our links. This caused a significant level of packet loss into our network at approx 22:50 on 31st January.
The link was removed from use and service was resumed albeit with reduced resilience. The issue has been reported to the carrier who have identified a potential problem and resolved this.
