[LCH Announce] Major network maintenance announcement

[Phillip Baker]

Hi,

As previously mentioned on this mailing list we have been planning to
upgrade the core for some time.

All of the required parts have no finally arrived and we're setting two
windows - one at risk period and one maintenance window.

The at risk period is for some rearrangement of the cabinet to take place to
make suitable room for the new equipment to be installed in the rack as it
is slightly larger than the equipment it is replacing. We hope to perform
this without any effect on the network at all, but some services on certain
hosts may be impacted if they have to be powered off to be relocated. This
period is scheduled for Sunday 23rd October 8am until 1pm.

The maintenance window is for the swap out of routers and the
reconfiguration of the entire core. This should hopefully be relatively
straightforward as we intend to have all of the configs prewritten and hope
to only have to make minor changes to the configs to solve any last minute
problems. There may be some issues with accepting the new equipment MAC
addresses on some of the networks we connect to and we will expect to have
these resolved by midday at the latest.

The maintenance window for the actual upgrade to take place is scheduled for
Monday 24th October 1am until Monday 24th October 7am. While the work is
being performed there will be complete loss of service to the Telehouse East
network. We do not expect the actual network outage to last anything like as
long as this, but we have to be cautious given the amount of changes and
work involved. We do not expect this work to impact on our intersite
backhaul customers, who have the luxury of separate network equipment in
Telehouse East which is not directly affected by this maintenance.

To summarise:

At risk period:
Starts: Sunday 23rd October 8am
Ends:   Sunday 23rd October 1pm
Impact: Individual hosts may be affected with short <30 minute outages.
Network should be completely unaffected, but should be considered at risk
for the duration of this maintenance window.
Reason: Preparation of cabinet for installation of new routing equipment

Maintenance period:
Starts: Monday 24th October 1am
Ends:   Monday 24th October 7am
Impact: Total loss of all network services to Telehouse East and BGP Routed
customers. Intersite services should not be affected by this work.
Reason: Upgrade of core network to massively increase capacity in order to
accommodate current and future customers.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by outages resulting from this
work, but assure you that it is absolutely necessary in order to preserve
the high quality of our services as traffic demands increase.

Regards,
Phillip Baker
LCHost Chief Technical Officer
phil at lchost.co.uk
0870 068 HOST ext 50