Combell invests in major network upgrade
Being the market leader in the Belgian hosting industry, we’ve always positioned ourselves in the quality segment. To maintain this position, we are required to do major investments: knowledge-wise, as well as infrastructure-wise.
Over the years we’ve invested heavily in our network because it is the foundation of our business. Due to the increase in growth and our own strict quality requirements, a new investment has been made and we’ve purchased new hardware for our network infrastructure.
Scheduled maintenance
Without an implementation, this investment isn’t worth anything. The implementation is basically a network upgrade where the new appliances will be put into production.
The infrastructure is “top of the line” hardware by Juniper and it will make sure we can offer an even better stability guarantee.
Why?
Stability and flexibility are our key motives. A more nuanced answer requires a bit more detail.
A redundant network setup and the right choice of hardware currently allow us to guarantee this stability. Right now we apply an “n+1” strategy. This means that every component in our network has a duplicate.
We will continue and extend this strategy. On our objectives is to go from “n+1” to “2n+2”. This means everything is double and provided with 2 extra duplicates.
Combell applies a pure multi-datacenter strategy and we offer redundancy across datacenters. By adding new network infrastructure, we aren’t just redundant across datacenters, but also within each datacenter.
The new hardware also introduces MPLS/VPLS technology that will facilitate the connection to more datacenters in the future.
Capacity-wise, we’re also very flexible: a continuous growth forces us to extend our network capacity. This upgrade will make sure we can offer 2x 10 Gigabit instead of the current 2x 2 Gigabit.
The network interfaces provide a bandwidth of 100 Gigabit per second each and in total a theoretical bandwidth of 2 Terrabit per second. We clearly have options to grow in the future. But this increase in capacity and bandwidth doesn’t just apply to external traffic, but also within our different datacenters.
When?
This upgrade is scheduled to be executed mid-January. The exact dates of the several stages will be communicated in due time through our states pages. You will find these pages at http://status.combell.com/en.
Please keep an eye out for any updates. You can subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also subscribe via e-mail.
The upgrade will be executed in 2 stages. Each of these maintenance stages will take place on Sunday night. Timing-wise this will be between midnight and 6 AM.
What’s the impact?
Although the maintenance will be scheduled off-peak, there will be a noticeable impact.
There will be interruptions between midnight and 6 AM. These interruptions will be rather short, but depending on the datacenter or the location in the network, these interruptions can last a bit longer.
It is certain that the outages will not last the entire upgrade.
Conclusion
Our clients will benefit directly or indirectly from this upgrade. Unfortunately there will be a short outage. We’ll be as transparent as possible in our communication and we’ll do this through http://status.combell.com/en .
Please pay close attention to the status pages. We sincerely thank you for your understanding and your trust.
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