The night before 13 May was a work night in Coolhousing. Besides regular operating personnel, a whole group of technicians and administrators were present in the data center, who in the shortest amount of time possible worked to improve our network, so that we could offer you placement of servers in a geographically separate location and more.
The upgrade went as planned and without any major problems. On your servers, you may have noticed a pre-announced outage of connectivity at around three o’clock in the morning, but please be aware that it was worth it, because of the new features that we can offer you now that the network upgrade has been completed. For your servers, we are preparing a geographically separate location in the Sitel Telehouse building.
Upgrade of routers and monitoring of operation
Our existing edge router, Juniper MX80, not only received an system update, but as well a younger brother (another MX80), in order to ensure redundancy of routers inside the network of our data center. This installation has enabled us to remove the older Juniper EX4200 switch.
The new router firmware supports advanced monitoring of operations in the network. We will newly no longer carry out monitoring of operations in routers via software, but for better performance we will use a specialised hardware module. This information will help you to improve network safety and speed up resolution of incidents. In short, it will enable us to provide you with even better quality services.
Second location and redundant connectivity
Improvement of the network in the data center will enable us to establish an entirely passive 10Gbps optical connection to Sitel, where we will soon move one of our connections to NIX and from where we will receive foreign connectivity via Interoute. This will provide us with complete redundancy of connectivity.
In the event of an outage of the current route from the data center to GTS Telehouse, operations of the data center will be routed via Sitel. In the event of an outage of connectivity in Sitel, the servers in Sitel will communicate via our data center through GTS Telehouse. And finally, in the event of an outage of the connection between the data center and Sitel, the connection of both locations will be enabled through a private VLAN via NIX.
The installation of new elements and expansion will create different conditions for establishing a direct connection of our network to the Slovak peering node SIX as well as other important peering nodes in Amsterdam and Frankfurt (DE-CIX and AMS-IX). This spring and summer there will be huge innovations in Coolhousing!
