Planned maintenance (datacenter migration, 2023-05-26)

  • Wednesday, 31st May, 2023
  • 03:09am

We are excited to announce that Unreal Servers will be moving their operations to the newly built NOCIX datacenter by the end of the month.

We currently operate from 2 datacenters in the region : Unreal Servers (1321 Burlington St) and NOCIX (1530 Swift St). Both datacenters are in Kansas City, just half a mile apart (a 8 minutes walk). Unreal Servers uses NOCIX' network.

NOCIX is the far superior and bigger datacenter. They are excellent. In few words, there has been close to no downtime at NOCIX these past several years while there's been multiple incidents at Unreal Servers. In fact, we first were present at 1321 Burlington St and, few years ago, we stopped expanding there and started shipping all new servers to 1530 Swift St because of how superior this facility is. NOCIX is finishing building an extension to their datacenter (same address) and Unreal Servers will close their operations at 1321 Burlington St and move to 1530 Swift St.

Furthermore, the main cause of downtime for our clients at Unreal Servers is accidental cable disconnects. We are taking this opportunity to change all network cables to ultra premium, snagless premade cables and we will also ensure that all power connectors use a retention sleeve. We are also moving the servers in a way that will eliminate all the cable clutter that has built up over the years (no patch cable cross-connect). This should pretty much eliminate the occurrence of accidental cable disconnects.

Overall, this move means vastly improved uptime and reliability.

This message has been sent to update you regarding the ongoing datacenter migration maintenance.

The migration was planned and is being executed very poorly. It is still ongoing and it's expected to last until Tuesday or Wednesday.

As a reminder of the timeline of events, we were first notified about the migration on May 15th and we agreed to execute it on May 26th. We were then told, on May 20th, that the migration was postponed until further notice. We were notified on May 26th, early in the afternoon, that the migration was in fact never meant to be postponed and that it had to be done immediately. Between May 15th and May 26th, we slowly made preparations, but we were not ready at all on the 26th. We also did not keep Unreal Servers in check to make sure that they had done their own due dilligence (which they didn't), again because we understood that it was postponed to next month. We rushed to make vital preparations, which took about 15 hours and exactly met Unreal Servers' deadline of 07:30 CST. Because of a confluence of very untimely events and extreme fatigue, it was difficult to supervise Unreal Servers, on May 27th. They moved a small group of servers, many of which are still offline. We're currently waiting for their assistance to finish the work.

We have no choice but to keep going with this migration. Unreal Servers intends to shutdown all operations at 1321 Burlington St by June 1st. We expect a much larger group of servers to be moved tomorrow. We will be able to more closely supervise their work this time, so hopefully this should go smoother. We still advise to prepare for an extended downtime.

Our role in this migration is to configure network equipment as it becomes available and to report issues to Unreal Servers. On the 26th and during the night from the 26th to the 27th, we prepared everything needed to quickly and accurately do the configuration. Unfortunately, we faced so far problems such as the new cabinets not being deep enough to accomodate our equipment, switches not being made available to us, a lack of parts (optics), servers not being powered on after being physically moved and so on. We expect the next movement of servers to be better executed, but most of these problems could have been avoided with better preparation.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this maintance is causing you and we look forward to completing it as soon as possible.

Thank you,

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