WORK TYPE: Core Upgrade / Circuit Migration
WORK PURPOSE: Continued growth in Chicago Datacenter
WORK START TIME: 08/16/08 22:00 CDT
WORK END TIME (EST): 08/17/08 04:00 CDT
IMPACT: Suboptimal routing during reconvergence
WORK DETAILS: We will be migrating several transit and aggregation circuits to upgraded IP core devices in the Chicago datacenter to facilitate continued growth and new product offerings
Our facilities provider in Chicago has announced routine generator maintenance for later this month. This maintenance is only for the CRG portion of our Chicago presence. There is no expected impact as a result of this maintenance, and this announcement is informational only:
Primary Dates: 29 July 2008 10:00:00 - 29 July 2008 12:00:00 Central Standard Time
Location of Maintenance: Layered Technologies CHGO
Summary Description of Maintenance: Monthly Generator runs will be preformed on the IDC Generators. Building engineers and CRG West Operations will be onsite throughout the entire maintenance window. Best practice and procedures will be employed throughout the maintenance and we would like to ensure that all relevant IDC tenants are aware of the activity.
Every year the FastServers engineering team conducts major upgrades throughout all of our facilities for ongoing stability, network enhancements, and some consolidation effort. The time has come again for us to make our annual review of all our environments and on the docket: Fremont, CA. Therefore, beginning August 1, 2008, and throughout the entire weekend ending August 3, 2008, FastServers will be performing mandatory datacenter floor maintenance to our Fremont facility. These activities will consist of the realignment of all FS-owned and operated servers, switches, and routing cores within the hosting facility in question. The purpose of this dispatch is to alert all of our Fremont customers, dedicated or co-located, of these planned events occurring at the beginning of August 2008.
It is imperative that all customers are aware of this maintenance as there will be multiple outages that will occur during our planned maintenance within this facility. At this time we cannot schedule around any particular customers’ server operations, nor minimize the amount of downtime for a specific client; it is almost impossible to say when, precisely, we would handle a client’s server during this operational window. FastServers will do its best to ensure that any downtime that occurs due to our mandatory maintenance shall have the least amount of impact on customers’ hosting environments.
Customers who are interested in migrating to one of our other facilities, to ensure operations stay online for their hosting needs, should speak with a sales representative immediately to begin collectively working on a migration plan for their hosting needs. Our sales representatives will provide all of the necessary elements for customers wanting to upgrade/migrate to another facility to continue operations before this maintenance period is upon us. Please note that that if you choose to migrate to one of FastServers’ other facilities, existing IP allocations will *not* be portable. This means that new IP addresses will need to be distributed to your solution within a new facility. Again, this is only for customers housed within our Fremont datacenter: by receiving this email, it’s apparent that you have one or more servers housed within our Fremont hosting environment. In addition, customers running outdated operating systems, control panels, etc., will be *required* to upgrade to the latest releases supported by FastServers; co-location customers excluded, if a migration to an elsewhere facility is preferred.
If you have any additional questions about the migration, please contact a support representative who will forward your request to a FastServers.Net administrator for further clarification. If you are interested in migrating your solution prior to the outlined maintenance, please speak with a sales representative immediately.
Your cooperation is certainly appreciated!
WORK TYPE: Emergency Maintenance
WORK PURPOSE: Circuit Migration
WORK START TIME: 06/30/08 22:00 CST
WORK END TIME (EST): 07/01/08 06:00 CST
IMPACT: None expected
WORK DETAILS: Due to increased errors being displayed on a link to one of our transit providers, we are proactively moving the circuit to a new interface in order to perform additional troubleshooting/diagnostics. There may be minor routing instabilities during the actual circuit move. No downtime is expected of this maintenance.
Greetings,
As many of you may already be aware, the Midwestern portion of the United States has been inundated with unusually heavy rainfall over the past several days and weeks. The situation has resulted in historical levels of rainfall and flooding throughout the region.
Our Cedar Falls, IA Data Center, while not directly impacted by this situation, is located in an area which is currently experiencing flooding, road closures, utility issues, and mandatory evacuations. Due to the already wide ranging impact of these natural weather events, and the potential to disrupt power and connectivity stability across the area, we are reaching out to all of our customers hosted within the Cedar Falls, IA Data Center in an effort to keep you well informed.
The Layered Technologies/FastServers teams are working diligently with our facilities provider, connectivity providers, and with other local resources in preparation for any possible utility or connectivity disruptions in the area. Our normal contingency plans are already in place covering power, connectivity, and support redundancies. However, the scale of this natural weather event dictate that we take additional precautions to ensure the integrity of the site, and the safety of our employees.
We are sending this notification out to ensure you are aware of the events surrounding our facility, and to inform you of some of the special actions we are taking to keep our operations and support services available:
- Our Chicago-based support team will be on standby to take over for our Cedar Falls team, should the need arise
- We have been in contact with our Cedar Falls staff not yet on shift to check on their well being
- We have been in contact with all service providers, and have been active in emergency planning with the facilities provider, covering emergency power, access, and interaction with the local power utility
- Our sales group will be suspending new orders for 48 hours to ensure our focus is on supporting existing customers and managing any impact from the weather situation
Our Cedar Falls Data Center was designed and built from the ground-up to sustain operations throughout most natural and man-made events. Redundancies are in place for generator power, fuel providers, connectivity, and access for situations such as this. N+1 redundant power generators with three emergency fuel providers are in place, and 3 diverse paths for fiber connectivity across 3 separate carriers service our operations. We remain very focused on the situation at hand, and the sheer scale of the damage caused to the local communities from the rain and flooding. We will continue to monitor the situation very closely, and take whatever actions are possible to minimize any impact to our customers and to our employees.
We appreciate your patience and understanding while we work through this event. We will continue to provide updates as necessary to our forums at http://forums.fastservers.net and major updates through both the forums and email notification to our customers.
Sincerely,
Jack Finlayson
CEO
Layered Technologies
The FastServers.Net forums will be unavailable for a period of time Thursday, June 12th beginning at 00:00 CDT, as they are migrated from one server to another. During the migration, the forums will be temporarily inaccessible as a final copy is taken and transported to the new server. DNS will then be updated, and forwards placed on the old server to ensure that everyone is seeing the correct version of the forums.
If you have any questions regarding the FastServers.Net forums or this maintenance, open a ticket with our support department, and we will be happy to assist!
WORK TYPE: Generator Maintenance
WORK PURPOSE: Routine Maintenance
WORK START TIME: 06/10/08 07:00 CDT
WORK END TIME (EST): 06/10/08 16:00 CDT
IMPACT: None
WORK DETAILS: The datacenter provider for our Chicago datacenter has informed us of a maintenance to service the generators providing backup power to the datacenter. This is a regularly scheduled preventative maintenance with no impact to the facility or its failover capacity. The appropriate building and electrical engineers and datacenter staff will be onsite for the duration of the window.
Thanks.