Update: The upgrade was performed within the predetermined time frame without any issues. Shortly, a new article will be published with pictures of the infrastructure.
On Monday (the 17th of August 2015), between 09:00 and 13:00, all of our servers in Stockholm will be down since we are upgrading the data center’s infrastructure. All of our servers in Malmö will be available during the downtime.
In Stockholm, we currently have our own 20-height units rack cabinet. On Monday, we will be migrating all of our equipment to a new, 42-height units cabinet. The migration is being made in order to stabilize the service and substantially enhance the performance.
The current switch in Stockholm (BDCOM S3928) is being replaced in favor of a Cisco N5K-C5010P-BF Nexus, a substantially more powerful 10GbE switch.
All of our servers in Stockholm are currently connected with a 2 x 1 Gbit/s connection, but after the migration, all of our servers will be connected with 10 Gbit/s instead. This means that we will be installing 10 GbE network cards in all of our servers during the downtime. Of course, all of the servers will continue working without any kind of permanent media.
Since updates have been released by HP that we thus far haven’t had the possibility to implement, the BIOS for the servers will also be updated during the downtime.
This upgrade should completely solve our problem with packet loss and considerably enhance our performance and drift security.
When the infrastructure upgrade is completed, we will be uploading pictures of what the new infrastructure looks like.
In the coming week, we will be deploying a new DNS server in Stockholm in order to enhance the performance of DNS calls. All current VPN servers are currently working as DNS as well, meaning that all DNS calls are being spread out on many different servers, resulting in fewer cached results. By deploying a server specifically designed to handle DNS calls, we can cache more results and thus enhance performance.