Maintenance on 2012-10-09 22:00 CEST - update 2

To finally finish the exchange of the faulty switch we will perform a series of hardware maintenance steps tomorrow (2012-10-09) night between 22:00 and 24:00 CEST.

The following tasks will be performed:

• Finish the migration to a new power distribution system in our racks
• Move our standby switch next to the faulty switch, verify correct operation
• Move the existing network connections from the faulty switch to the replacement
• Install a new standby switch

As our switches do not have a redundant power supply there will be a short outage of the whole network for about 1-2 minutes. We do not expect any failures in operation but existing connections may hang for this period.

Also, when moving the cables from the faulty switch to its replacement there will be short lags in storage or server network connectivity for a few seconds but no outages. 

We are sorry that this preventive measure has taken multiple attempts to implement. We think that our decisions to support a stable environment with careful small adjustments is in the interest of your operational needs.

Update 1 [2012-10-08 12:26]

The previous version of this post mentioned 2012-10-08 as the date of the maintenance. The actual scheduled date is 2012-10-09. The text above was corrected.

Update 2 [2012-10-09 23:32]

The faulty switch has, finally, been successfully replaced. In a window of about 5 minutes the redundant routers where in an inconsistent state causing some outgoing connections to fail. Otherwise all interruptions where short and intermediate without further consequences.