Revised Network Backbone
We have received valuable feedback in response to our announcement of the upcoming migration of legacy The Planet server traffic to the SoftLayer backbone network.
As announced, this migration is planned in order to provide legacy servers the improved performance, stability, peering, and network reach provided through hardware and network capacity upgrades in the SoftLayer backbone.
Some customers voiced concerned that the work was scheduled too close to holiday shopping periods at the end of November, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In consideration of these concerns we are accelerating the maintenance so that all phases will be completed before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Please note the revised schedule below.
Once again, we do not anticipate any downtime related to this work. The migration is planned in a series of steps to gracefully shift inbound and outbound traffic to peers and ISPs across our various data centers. Customers may notice a change in Internet traffic paths to and from servers as we progress through this migration.
The revised timeline will be:
Wednesday, November 16 2011 12:00AM - 4:00AM CST
(06h00 – 10h00 UTC 16-NOV-2011)
Preparation work to configure NetFlow export on the DSRs in Dallas and Houston: During this window there will be no changes made to traffic paths, however configuration will be applied to the aggregation routers to prepare for the final topology. Since these routers handle the aggregate of all customer traffic, this work is scheduled for off-peak times as a precaution.
Thursday November 17, 2011 10:00AM – 2:00PM CST
(16h00 – 20h00 UTC 17-NOV-2011)
Ingress changes, phase 1: During this window we will begin to shift ingress traffic from the Internet over to the SoftLayer backbone. Traffic paths into legacy Planet servers will take SoftLayer peers and backbone ISPs.
Friday November 18, 2011 10:00AM – 2:00PM CST
(16h00 – 20h00 UTC 18-NOV-2011)
Ingress changes, phase 2: During this window we will complete the shift of ingress traffic from the Internet over to the SoftLayer backbone. We will cease all ingress traffic via the legacy Planet peers and ISPs.
Monday November 21, 2011 10:00AM – 2:00PM CST
(16h00 – 20h00 UTC 21-NOV-2011)
Egress changes, phase 1: During this window we will begin to shift egress traffic to the Internet over to the SoftLayer backbone. Traffic paths from legacy Planet servers will egress a mix of SoftLayer peers and legacy Planet ISP links, based on best available route.
Tuesday November 22, 2011 10:00AM – 2:00PM CST
(16h00 – 20h00 UTC 22-NOV-2011)
Egress changes, phase 2: During this window we will continue to shift egress traffic to the Internet over to the SoftLayer backbone. Some traffic paths from legacy Planet servers will be shifted over to the SoftLayer ISPs.
Wednesday November 23, 2011 10:00AM – 2:00PM CST
(16h00 – 20h00 UTC 23-NOV-2011)
Egress changes, phase 3: During this window we will complete the shift of all egress traffic to the Internet over to the SoftLayer backbone. We will cease all egress traffic via legacy Planet ISPs in Dallas and Houston.
Thank you,
2011/11/11
