This is a heads up about some networking improvements (at Dallas) we will be making over the weekend.

In Dallas we take a network feed from our upstream providers.  That feeds into our ‘core’ networking gear.  And we distribute it from that core gear to the cabinets we operate in Dallas.  The core gear is therefore pretty critical to our setup.

A few years back our core gear was a 100Mbps Cisco switch.

That gear has been upgraded a few times.  The last time was a few months back when we upgraded to gigabit gear at our core.  We are currently idling along on two ‘stacks’ of those 3750 switches.

The current network setup is working pretty well.  But Carl here (our networking guru) has identified a few things we can do to make it more reliable long term.

That includes using redundant power feeds to the stacks.  Adding more bandwidth capacity between the stacks.  And adding more uplinks to our upstream providers in the data center (to provide more  failover capability as well as extra capacity).

After these changes we remove single points of failure.  And make some key performance and reliability improvements.

Carl has posted a maintenance notice about that at https://rimuhosting.com/maintenance.jsp?server_maint_oid=11563927 and we will be emailing affected customers shortly.  We have talked about the work.  Trying to provide long term improvements but also trying do cause the least disruption to customers.  Hopefully the plan we have come up with meets those targets for most customers.