Greetings,

I know many of you have been waiting for an announcement regarding the network upgrades that Lance mentioned last month. I'm pleased to announce that the equipment has arrived and been installed, and we plan to migrate to the new routing/switching architecture this weekend. The final cutover time is not set in stone, but right now it appears that we'll be doing the bulk of the work on Sunday afternoon. We've decided to do it in the afternoon so that if there are any issues, we can have them worked out before peak times during the regular business week. We have configured the new infrastructure so that we will be able to do the work without impacting customers in any significant way.

Here's a brief overview of what we're doing:

First of all - we are centralizing all of our core routing and switching infrastructure into the DLLSTX3 (Equinix) POP in the Infomart in Dallas. We have upgraded the core switching infrastructure to a pair of Cisco 6500's with SUP-720 switching engines. The new switching engines support up to 720G of backplane bandwidth on each chassis. We're also upgrading the bandwidth between the datacenters and the DLLSTX3 POP to a whopping 16G of connectivity. To clarify, the DLLSTX2 and DLLSTX4 datacenters will be directly connected to the DLLSTX3 datacenter at 16G/each. In addition, the DLLSTX2 and DLLSTX4 datacenters will also be connected to each other at 16G, allowing us to back each datacenter up in case of fiber equipment failure, cuts, etc.

Next, we are upgrading the number of connections we have in place. There are 5 new circuits ready to turn up on Sunday:

(2) ATT
Level(3)
AboveNet
Global Crossing


In addition to these circuits, we are going to be interconnecting to the public peering switch in the Equinix datacenter, which will allow us to get direct connectivity to several large NSP's, bypassing any transit networks. We also have several private peering connections that we'll be turning up over the coming weeks as well. And for you unmetered customers, we plan to have the third Cogent connection up and running in the coming days, with a 4th one ready to go shortly after that.

The last phase of all of these upgrades is that we'll be upgrading our core routers. We've been using the Juniper M20 series routers and have been extremely happy with them. But the time has come where we now need to upgrade these in order to support faster interfaces (such as OC192/10GbE). In the coming months, we'll be upgrading the core routers to Juniper T-320 series routers. Once these routers are in place, we will be ready to start upgrading the multi-gigabit links to some our providers to either OC192 or 10-Gigabit-Ethernet connections.

I've probably missed a couple of things in this post. But I hope all of you are as excited as we are about these upgrades.
_________________
William Charnock
VP Network Engineering
ThePlanet.com

Update:

We will begin the work at 3pm Sunday afternoon. We will be moving links 1 at a time, so we don't anticipate any downtime.

In addition, because of some problems with ATT, it appears we will not have the 2 new ATT links until Monday at the earliest. Sorry for this, but they haven't completed all the work on their side that they need to. We will however, have the other new links in place on Sunday.
_________________
William Charnock
VP Network Engineering
ThePlanet.com

Greetings,

Just wanted to update everyone. The network reconfig is proceeding normally now. There were a couple of hiccups early with some of the new links, but we're making good headway now.

Currently have the 3 AboveNet and 3 Level(3) links moved and up. About to move over 4 more links. We will update once this is completed.
_________________
William Charnock
VP Network Engineering
ThePlanet.com

But why did you not know about this planned maintance before it happened?