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We’ve sent out communications today to customers informing them of firmware upgrades this Friday morning @ 03:00 on 4 network switches at the Sheffield Data Centre.

Not all services will be out at the same time as we’re staggering the upgrades over the course of an hour.  Customers may experience a brief outage while the switch they’re connected to reloads following the firmware upgrade.

For customers:  For more info see the email which was sent today (08/02/2012) around 1pm.

Once these urgent upgrades are done, future switch firmware upgrades will be staggered sometime in March.

UPDATE 10/02/2012 @ 04:00 – a switch has factory reset  :-(  we’ve upgraded the firmware and reloading the config, customers connected to VLAN’s 812 onwards may experience a few more minutes of outage while the switch reloads again, once done we’ll carry on with the rest of the upgrades.

UPDATE @ 04:40 – both core QOS switches have now been upgraded, took longer than we thought (sorry about that), all colo services should now be back online!  Customers on QOS1 (VLAN’s 801-811) may have been intermittent for 19 minutes, customers on QOS2 (VLAN’s 812-823) may have been intermittent for 22 minutes.

Due to customer demand, we’ve increased the inbound & outbound attachement limits for customers on Hosted Exchange 2010 to 40MB (up from 10MB).

This week we have ordered an additional fibre into the Sheffield Data Centre.

The fibre will be provided by BT for connection direct into their 21CN network, with onward Internet transit.  This brings our fibre connectivity N+1 in line with power and cooling which is already redundant.  BT also brings a second transit provider to us.

We’re all really pleased here at HA Hosting, as another fibre will enable us to trial several in-the-pipeline products, including the possible return to dedicated gaming colo.  The additional bandwidth has already been partially pre-sold to existing customers requiring extra capacity, and will allow us to meet future needs.

Due sometime in April, we’ll of course blog the install when it happens, and if BT have top open any more manholes, we’ll try to get pictures  :-)