As you may already be aware we are going through a major overhaul of our network infrastructure updating almost everything. Our company is growing at a fast rate and doing our best to keep up with our quality of service.
Our network edge router was replaced about two weeks ago and the upgrade was successful yesterday we successfully moved to direct-connection with Comcast bypassing FDC edge router. This has decreased the latency to our customers (between 10ms to 20ms). Comcast is a major Tier1 provider with multiple peering agreements with major players like Level3, UUNet, CogentCo.. etc. Within the next month we will also be adding TATA with a redundant link. Comcast also provides us with BGP nullroute which will allow us in case of network impacting attacks to resort to nullrouting at a higher level of the network and decrease the impact of the attack.
The last time we did maintenance we also attempted replacing our core router. Our core router is responsible of routing directly to the main switching environment and is an extremely critical part of our network that can be a bit complex compared to other networks. The failure we had was studied carefully with CISCO and we found a product that is guaranteed to fit our requirements.
Friday May 1st 2009 10:00PM EST we will be replacing our current core with Cisco Catalyst 4506-E with Supervisor Engine-6 the latest and greatest in Cisco’s arsenal. Because of the fact we did most of the changes successfully last maintenance around this coming maintenance range between seem less to 3-5 minutes of connectivity drop. The move will only require moving switching uplinks connection from old core to new core and turning on the cross-connect. We understand the last maintenance ended up being a horrible nightmare to everyone involved and we can assure you such will never happen again.
Saturday May 2nd 2009 (All day activity) we will be upgrading some of the current L2 switching infrastructure with “stacked” switching with redundant uplinks connectivity during this time some customers may notice their network interface go down/up once this should be ok as we are moving their port to the new switch.
Those two upgrades will conclude our updates to our infrastructure that would be customer impacting.
We would like to inform you that both 1st and 2nd May's maintenances have been completed successfully. Our new core router has been in production since yesterday with absolutely no problems. Additionally we have performed re-wiring to all our routers, firewalls & switches and stacked switching to our L2 switch infrastructure as it was initially announced.
We would like to apologize for some short network interruptions that occurred earlier today (18:06-19:10 CDT) which totally lasted for about 33-35 minutes. All these upgrades had been scheduled in order to offer you better service in the long run.
