Scheduled VXC network maintenance - 09-May-2020

[porcupine]

Hi Folks,

Please be advised of the following maintenance window:

Maintenance Window: Saturday May 9th, 2020, 12:01am - 2:00am Eastern Time.
Facility: Tor1, Tor2
Affected Device(s): vxc01.tor1, vxc02.tor2 (Private layer2 interconnects between the Tor1/Tor2 facilities)
Affected Customers: Customers with private layer2 interconnects between their equipment in both the Tor1 and Tor2 facilities.
Service Impacting: Yes - Customers on the Layer2 interconnect switch/fabric will see a short outage.

Details: We will be changing how the VXC (virtual cross-connect) service is delivered, and migrating to different gear. Since the VXC service was initially introduced in 2013, the service has been based off providing redundant L2 private interconnects to colo customers who have presences in both facilities. The original deployment relied on RSTP technology to provide the redundant L2 connectivity over multiple 10G fiber providers, ensuring that fiber cuts/etc. would not down customers interconnects.

That said, RSTP is not flawless, the protocol was selected due to service considerations present during initial deployment. When traffic is shifted from one 10G wave to another, customers see a service impact of several seconds as spanning tree recalculates the path, etc. This was a definite factor in providing the desired service, at the desired price point.

With the recent upgrade of connectivity between our two facilities, installation of diverse dark fiber routes, and DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexers), we are able to run our own wave services, and carve out dedicated transport waves for each service as necessary. We will be deploying a new VXC switch, and moving from using the RSPT protocol to provide the failover, to using LACP port-channels. Port-channels will ensure that individual fiber cuts have a negligible impact on customers private L2 connectivity, and remove the short outages caused by spanning tree recalculations.

Given we will be deploying new gear in advance, and shifting customer ports over to the new gear with staff in each facility performing the migration steps in unison, we anticipate the outage caused by this maintenance to be very short. Depending on a number of factors, customers could see outages ranging from < 1 minute, up to 15 minutes.

Customers who have any questions regarding this maintenance should reach out to us directly using our support@ email address.

Regards,