Our main data center provider, RackSpace, is closing down one of its data centers in Dallas Texas. This data center, DFW1, is a number of years old and is being shut down and all RackSpace customers using this facility are being physically moved to a brand new data center, DFW3. The new data center location (just down the road) is very much updated, including:
1. Higher network capacities
2. Higher power densities
3. More advanced options for fast cross connections with other data centers and third-party providers
4. More advanced maintainability solutions
In order to transition to this new facility and to close down DFW1, RackSpace is physically moving customers using DFW1 to DFW3 in waves. LuxSci's turn is scheduled for the night of Saturday, February 10th. During this maintenance window, LuxSci's dedicated hardware will be powered down, physically transported to the new data center, and powered on. This includes our firewalls, load balancers, and enterprise-class servers. Business-class servers are not being moved; however, as all traffic for business-class servers located in the DFW data centers is routed through our hardware firewalls, these business-class servers will also be inaccessible during the maintenance.
The timeline we have received from RackSpace is as follows (in Eastern Time, USA, starting Saturday night):
11:45pm Saturday - 12:40am ET Sunday - Devices powered off
12:40am - 2:15am - Devices removed and packaged for transport
2:15am - 3:15am - Devices loaded and transported to DFW3
3:15am - 4:45am - Devices racked in DFW3 and powered back on
4:45am - 8:00am - Connectivity checks and validation
The first of our devices powered back on will be our firewalls. Thus, connectivity to all business-class servers should resume first. We expect a total of 4-5 hours disruptive downtime during this migration. This will impact most LuxSci services including: hosted email, smart hosting, high volume email, inbound email delivery, email access, WebMail access, LuxSci's "luxsci.com" web site and all private labeled web sites, Web hosting, database hosting, SecureForm processing, SecureText, WebAides, Workspaces, API, MobileSync, and VPN.
Services NOT affected include: SecureChat, SecureVideo, Access to existing Email Archives, Premium Email Filtering, and DNS. Additionally, customers with dedicated servers outside of Dallas, will be affected only in a limited way that depends on their particular use cases.
For customers that use SecureForm's FormBuilder, your hosted forms will still be available. However, submission and saving of these forms will not work during the maintenance and your end users should receive a dialog indicating that the back-end server is unavailable.
It is, unfortunately, not possible to reschedule this maintenance or opt specific customers out of the maintenance. LuxSci staff will be standing by to make sure that all services come back online properly as soon as possible. The change of data center will otherwise be completely transparent. No IP addresses or domain names are being changed. No DNS updates or reconfigurations will be needed at all.
Please contact LuxSci support if you have any questions or concerns.
Posted Jan 09, 2018 - 09:58 EST