Last month I promised that we would have a surprise for every client. Unfortunately the planned surprise requires more time then expected so we have to delay that surprise for a bit. Do not worry! We have an other surprise! Because of the power outage we have had last week we have decided to do our migration to a 2N server room earlier.
What are 2N power feeds?
In the current situation we have a N+1 feed. This means that there is one power feed with one UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and generator. The UPS gives us temporarily power when the datacenter does not get any power from the net and gives the generator time to start up. This allowed us to have a 100% power uptime since we have moved to Serverius until last week.
With 2N we have two power feeds that each have a different circuit board, UPS and generator. This was unavailable when we started in the datacenter Serverius. Since last year Serverius has a third room with 2N. The idea was to move this year to the third room and we started to plan the migration and ordered equipment to use the two power feeds.
Last week Serverius had a failure in the N+1 feed. The second feed in room 3 was still online because it used a different circuit board, UPS and generator. Although this was the first power failure in the proven 100% datacenter uptime of 5 years it did show that a second power feed is required to give you the best experience we can. Therefore we have decided to carry out the migration earlier then planned: 11 Februari 2014.
Planning (GMT+1)
- Tuesday 11 February 17:00 – Tuesday 11 February 17:30 We replace the switches with temporarily switches.
- Tuesday 11 February 23:00 – Wednesday 12 February 06:00 We migrate the servers to room 3 with 2N powerfeeds.
We think that the maximum downtime per server is 60 minutes or less. To speed everything up we have decided to replace the existing switches with temporarily switches which will cause a service interruption of 10 seconds. Then we install the switches in room 3 and prepare everything so we can migrate the servers with minimum downtime.
We also prepare the new location with power and network cables to make the move faster. Because this will not service interruption I did not include the times in this blog. Updates about the maintenance will be posted on https://yourwebhoster.eu.
Questions
A second power feed drives the price for hiring a rack up. Should I expect an price increase?
No. We believe that – even with a higher cost price – we can give you a better service for the same price. There will be no price increase.
Do I have to do something?
Most clients do not have to do anything: we shutdown your service properly and verify that your service comes back online. However you can read our knowledge base article about what you should do when maintenance is announced. Note that the knowledge base will also be offline during the maintenace.
Can I reinstall a VPS during the maintenance?
It is not possible to reinstall a VPS during the maintenance.
How do you connect the servers to the 2N power feeds?
We use an ATS (Automatic Transfer Switch) which will use the power feed that delivers power. If one power feed suddenly stops delivering power it will automatically switch to the power feed that has power.
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