LON Network Maintenance June 25/26

Event Date: 25 June 2015 – 22:00 BST until 26 June 2015 – 06:00 BST
Event Location: London, UK
Impact: Service may be briefly impacted during equipment hardware replacement.

ExtraMSP Network Engineering staff will be performing a equipment hardware replacement.

Reason for Maintenance:

On 23 June 2015, router ixn-jedge-02 suffered a switching failure. All traffic through the router was looped causing severe packet loss to our internal network. Switching the router to a passive mode returned our network to normal functioning. We have agreed with Juniper JTAC that the next course of action will be to replace the router as the issues we saw may be indicative of an underlying hardware fault.

Impact:

We do not expect to see any interruption to services while the router is installed. The router will be introduced to the network in a phased approach with regression steps for each phase.

However, we do expect that some customers may potentially experience short incidents of packet loss while we test the resilience of the network following the new router integration. We will endeavour to keep interruptions, if any, to an absolute minimum.

Further actions:

We, alongside Juniper, strongly believe that the router hardware may be at fault. If during our testing phase we see similar issues as we saw on Wednesday night, we will set the new router to passive mode and continue offline testing with Juniper with an aim to set another maintenance window shortly after that.

Thank you so much for your support while we work to make these improvements.