News: Planned Maintenance in November

7th November 2012
You may have received a Service Status Alert from us in recent days letting you know about some upcoming maintenance. Below we'll provide more information on the works being performed and how it will affect your service.

Why is this maintenance necessary?

We're currently working on an extensive project to improve our infrastructure and services to make them better for you our customers, and the project involves upgrades to almost every aspect of our systems. We've recently blogged about the general plans here if you'd like to know more.

What's affected and when?

We've been doing a huge amount of work behind the scenes which isn't customer affecting. The current expectations for planned interruptions to your services are:

November 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th - during office hours

We'll be performing some background works, which are not expected to be customer affecting and have planned our works to avoid interruption - however as is common practice in the industry we'll be marking these days as "at-risk" at all times.

November 9th, 10th, and 11th - between 20:00 and 06:00 each day.

During these times, we'll be running through a programme which will cause interruption to services. There are likely to be multiple short interruptions (typically lasting 2-5 minutes) while we make configuration changes - the exact timing will vary, but we're always aiming to keep these to a minimum. These brief interruptions will affect most shared services including:

For Shared Services, there will also be a bigger maintenance window for each server system that provides services, which will last approximately 2-3 hours (for example each Web Hosting Server will be taken offline one by one). We cannot accurately predict the specific date/time when each server will be affected within those overnight maintenance windows due to the complexity of the tasks.

There will also be a smaller number of interruptions to these services:

Agility Desktop (users will be reconnected automatically)
Agility Mail (users will be reconnected if using Outlook automatically)

The vast majority of interruptions will be in in the early hours where usage on these services is particularly low to minimise the number of customers interrupted. If you are a night owl or early bird you should be aware that performance may be poorer than usual or intermittent service possible.

These brief outages are necessary because as part of our bigger infrastructure improvement plan we need to deploy new switching and security equipment, and this will involve physically disconnecting and reconnecting systems. We'll also be addressing some issues with older services as well as making it possible to expand some of our services more easily. In some cases we'll also be migrating systems onto a new platform (which we've been using for some time without issues!) so we can retire older equipment or legacy services.

Special note for Agility Mail and Agility Desktop Customers:

We're aware that for a small number of customers recently affected by Agility Mail issues due to hardware issues that any mention of downtime isn't ideal, but we are performing these works overnight to avoid interruption during core business hours. It's also the case that some of the changes we're making are specifically designed to improve your service for the long term - the underlying need for some changes we're making are specifically to address the issues or improve our ability to work around third party system issues that have caused us problems so we can make the longer term stability of the service better. Please do speak to us if you're concerned about these works.

How to keep up to date

You can keep up to date with the changes we're making and when services will be receiving maintenance by checking our SERVICE STATUS page or subscribing to our TWITTER feed:

http://status.vpwsys.net/

http://twitter.com/VPWSYSStatus/ and http://twitter.com/VPWITServices/

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