Data Center Migration - Reminder

Posted 7 months ago

Happy Holidays!

Hopefully you’ve been fortunate enough to take some time off, wind down and relax. At Blue Box Group, we’ve been working harder than ever for the last few weeks finishing the final touches on the planning of our data center migration. We have had our new network online for a number of days and have been doing many forms of testing to ensure the new mesh core network design that we’ve installed will be incredibly resilient. We are very happy with the results from the testing and plan to proceed on schedule with this move.

Below are a few notes in this email as a reminder to you. We have written both a technical and non-technical section for your reference. Please do let us know if we can answer any other questions you have in preparation.

Non-Technical Summary:

We have completed our testing and will begin the migration of actual equipment starting on the 27th of December. We have finalized our equipment move plan, so if you have any questions about the final date of your server’s migration, please let us know and we will confirm that information with you.

We have devised a way to keep your existing internet addresses working even while your servers are in the new data center. This means you should experience significantly fewer issues from having to renumber the IP addresses.

We have a plan in place for any hardware failures during the move, however, we do recommend that you make a backup of sensitive data prior to the move as a precaution.

Technical Summary:

[1] Proxying Traffic – Big News!
[2] ARIN IP Space
[3] DNS Update Reminder
[4] Data Backup
[5] Move Schedule
[6] IP Addresses
[7] Having Trouble?

[1] Proxying Traffic – Big News!

We have implemented and tested proxying technology to proxy traffic from our old IP space to the new one until January 31st. What this means for you as a customer is that the only real impact you should see as a part of this move is the physical down time during the transit of the actual machines (roughly 2-3 hours), which will occur between 11pm and 3am Pacific Time, unless otherwise scheduled per your request. We will then have a full month to work with you to change DNS settings and anything else that points to the old IP addresses. Additionally, the internet connectivity between our two facilities is robust enough where they will act as though they are on the same local network, so the latency from this proxying service should be essentially unnoticed.

[2] ARIN IP Space

We’ve been granted our own ARIN IP space, which means we will never have to renumber IPs again. This is worth noting as the vast majority of our competitors do not have their own assignment (including Joyent, Engine Yard and Rails Machine). Having our own IP Space gives us a large amount of flexibility by allowing us to choose our own bandwidth providers and gives us significantly greater control over how we route traffic. The combination of those advantages allows us to provide you with more flexible options in the future for bandwidth growth. We expect to bring a number of new bandwidth providers online in early 2008, as well as to establish a number of peering arrangements to get data to all of our customers and your customers even faster!

[3] DNS Update Reminder

As another reminder, if we do not manage your DNS for you, you will need to update your DNS entries when we do this migration. Because of the proxying referenced above, you will have much greater flexibility on when you make these changes, but we recommend you complete them either during the transit of your equipment or the following day.

[4] Data Backup

While we do not expect drive failure to be a large issue as a part of this move, we have ensured that we have enough backup hard drives on hand to replace any that do fail. All our our hosting platforms use redundant drives, so if one does fail, there is no concern over data loss. We do recommend that customers make an offsite backup of any sensitive data before the move just as a precaution.

[5] Move Schedule

We are currently scheduled to move equipment on the following nights:

• December 27th
• December 28th
• December 30th
• January 2nd
• January 3rd
• January 4th

If you have requested a specific date and we’ve confirmed that date with you, then you are all set. If you have not yet requested a date, but need to fit your move into a specific time frame, please get in touch with us at support@blueboxgrp.com and we’ll do the best we can to accommodate your needs. Please be aware that we are tied to some time frames within this schedule and may not be able to accommodate all customers desires.

[6] IP Addresses

We now have a complete mapping of existing to new IP addresses. If you’d like to know your address before the move, please contact support@blueboxgrp.com and we can send you that information.

[7] Having Trouble?

If you have trouble with any of your services during the above dates, please make sure to call us at 800-613-4305×1. We will have one of our support representatives take down a description of your issue and pass it along to our system administrators who will be addressing any issues that arise.

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In closing, we are extremely excited to wrap this move up and move on to some of the new and exciting items we have planned for 2008. Thank for your being patient as we worked through the details.

- Jesse Proudman
CEO
Blue Box Group, LLC

Data Center Migration

Posted 7 months ago

Hello and Happy Holiday!

I want to thank you for choosing Blue Box Group to serve your business’ Internet needs. Your trust in our services is one of our most valuable assets. With that being said, I have exciting news to announce. During 2007, with your help, we experienced phenomenal growth wildly beyond our forecasts. This extreme growth has allowed us to bring aboard some amazing talent and given us the opportunity to work on new and exciting products and services that will benefit all of our customers. Unfortunately, it has also put us into a challenging position in regards to our existing data center space: we have outgrown our facility.

Keeping in mind the long-term success of our business, we have decided to migrate all of our existing equipment to a larger space, one that will allow for our sustained growth for the next five to ten years. Once the move is complete, our equipment will be located in a state-of-the art facility running on top of a fully redundant internal network with access to a large variety of bandwidth providers. From this move, you can expect better service with fewer outages and faster access to your data.

What this means for your as a customer:
During the last week of 2007 and the first week of 2008, we will be migrating all of our physical equipment to our new facility. Each customer should expect their service to be unavailable during transport for a maximum of 3.5 hours between 11pm and 3am Pacific Time.

If you would like to know the specific date your equipment will be moved, please send an email to support@blueboxgrp.com. If you would like to request a specific day within our window, please do let us know and we will do our best to accommodate your schedule. We want to make this as painless for our customers as realistically possible.

Credits For Outages:
During the second week of January, we will be issuing all customers a credit per our service level agreement for the time their equipment was unavailable.

Required Changes:
This move also requires a renumbering of all our servers with new IP addresses. For the vast majority of our customers, this shouldn’t be noticed. However, there are a few circumstances where you may need to be involved. We are also available to make the following changes for you during the transition as long as you have contacted us before hand. The required changes include:

• If you are using an IP address instead of a domain name to access your site, we will need to get you new IP information. We will provide this information to you before the move and can tell you the exact time to update it.
• If you are using external name servers or manage your own DNS, we will need to work with you to schedule updates to your DNS.
• If you are using local firewalls and basing those firewalls on IP addresses from our existing network, those will need to be updated.
• If you have multiple servers with us, and you are connecting them using IP addresses instead of hostnames, you will need to update those connections.
• If you are using any services which bind to a specific IP, you will need to update their configurations.

If you don’t know what any of the above means, it most likely doesn’t apply to you. However, our entire support staff is available to answer questions in advance of this move. Please make use of this resource!

After The Move:
We will email customers once their physical equipment has been moved. When you get that email, please login and make sure all the expected functionality of your site is operational. If it is not, please call our support line at 1-800-613-4305×1 and we will work with you to correct any issues that have been created.

We know this is inconvenient and for that, we sincerely apologize. We are hoping that with the timing of this move, we will be causing the least amount of impact to you and your business.

Thank you for your patience with this matter. We promise it will be worth it.

- Jesse Proudman
CEO
Blue Box Group, LLC