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Network Maintenance And Upgrades


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TotalChoice Hosting Maintenance Notice ::

 

Subject : Network Maintenance and Upgrades

Dates : 12/5/2013, 12/6/2013 & 12/7/2013

Times : 2200 - 0400 EST

Creator : Bill Kish

 

Description ::

 

On the above dates and times TotalChoice Hosting, Inc. will be conducting service affecting network maintenance

in our Troy, MI Data Center. This network maintenance is scheduled to commence at 11:00 pm EST on each day listed above.

TotalChoice customers can expect periods of network instability and network downtime during the mainte
nance window. This upgrade will increase the capacity, security and overall reliability of our network.

 

 

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Hello TCH Family!

 

I wanted to start a discussion with the TCH family about what we are doing during this maintenance window.

 

The first two days are planned for Distribution Switch Upgrades/Replacements. Many people have asked me why do you need to replace and or upgrade working switches. The answer is two fold. Firstly the in production switches have reached their end of life cycle. This means simply that they have given us a nice long run of uptime but its now time to replace them before we are faced with a 3am switch failure and everyone is in a total panic. Secondly, we are adding in another layer of redundancy to the network. Each of our new switches feature redundant uplinks / handoffs from the assigned aggregation switches. This means that we can take feeds from two network ports and feed the switch. This allows us to continue moving data even if we loose a line card, port or a cat6 run fails.

 

During the first two days we will be dealing solely with Distribution switch replacements. During the maintenance window clients with servers attached to the switches we are working on will see periods of network instability and short period of downtime. These first two days will not effect the entire network, the only effected servers will be servers on the switches we are replacing.

 

On Saturday we will phase into new Core Routers. This has been in planning phases for over 6 months and is a very large step for TCH. I am very excited about this upgrade. I can not go into full details as we would never want to talk publicly about our infrastructure but this upgrade will give us more capacity, stability, security and reliability. We will also be releasing a few new security policies on our network that should only effect people abusing the network. However with any new security polices we can expect to see a few bumps.

 

I would be more than happy to answer any questions here on this thread about the upgrade.

 

I will be personally overseeing this entire operation and will do my very best to make this a smooth and clean transition.

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Hi Bill

We are using email a great deal so during the maintaince downtime will we expect email to bounce or will they be queued for when the network is back up?

Cheers

Carl S

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Hey Carl,

 

Email is a wonderful thing until it stops working.

 

If someone send you an email and your server is offline the sending server will typically queue that failed sent email and attempt to send it again several times over a few day period. So you should get your emails when the network is back online.

 

We do not expect a long period of downtime so I would not be to concerned about it. Plus this is why we have scheduled the windows of maintenance to be late in the evening to keep things as calm as possible.

 

I hope this answers your question.

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Just wanted to give everyone a quick update.

 

In preparation for Saturdays Maintenance Window, tonight we successfully lit some of our new core routing gear. It will be in standby mode until Saturday!

 

It is a truly great day to be a TCH Guru!

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Guest Dan Hauser

Have you considered that you host e-commerce sites and this is the busiest time of the year for on-line shopping. If you must do maintenance 12/5, 6 and 7, please push it back until after midnight Pacific time.

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Hello,

 

We run our operations based on Eastern Standard Time. So therefore our maintenance windows are always based on EST.

 

In regards to hosting e-commerce sites. I am aware that we host tens of thousands of web sites and they range from large e-commerce sites down to local churches and schools. I do understand that any maintenance window is undesirable, however we can not change that this sort of maintenance is something that is required to maintain a reliable infrastructure and network.

 

We will do our best to limit the impact on our clients as always.

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We actually do have two data centers.

 

However, DC 2 is not going to be effected by this maintenance window.

 

If you would like more information about our new Data Center we will be posting some photos and updates next week concerning the new DC.

 

Thank you for your question.

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We have completed the switch swaps. Everything is progressing very smoothly.

 

There will be one more task that we need to complete.

 

This will effect a very limited number of servers.

 

I will post when we are starting this last item on our list for tonight.

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We have completed our maintenance for tonight.

 

All servers are back online and responding to services.

 

We have one remaining night of maintenance, which will begin tomorrow night at 11pm.

 

Thank you very much for your support.

 

It is really awesome to be a TCH Guru!

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