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Installation of SUPERFLICK

We are carrying out a series of updates in IDC (Invermay Data Centre) to install SUPERFLICK. To learn what SUPERFLICK is click here.

Maintenance is being carried out between 10:00pm and Midnight over three nights; Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, November 13 - 15. During this time some services will be unavailable for 5-10 minutes as they are moved. We are moving services between servers. This draws upon work done previously when we shifted to IDC. Your connection online will not be affected. A number of services will be delivered from our Christchurch network point as well while maintenance is underway.

Order of events

Tuesday - 10:00pm to midnight:- We will move from our primary storage to our secondary storage at IDC. Once that is done we will relocate a number of public facing servers over to different hardware. This frees up one of the chassises to then be moved. We will then verify operations.
Once confirmed it is out with spanners, power down the chassis and relocate it further down in the rack. The chassis is brought back up and selected services moved back. We will continue to run on the secondary storage server for a few days as this gives us an opportunity to continue with another project. More on this later.
We then move on to another chassis which holds various internal servers. Power down, remove, shift lower in rack, power up and check. Time pertmitting we may relocate a third chassis, but it is likely this will be done on Wednesday night instead.
 
Update on Tuesday work - This was carried out without problem overnight.The two main chassis we wanted to relocate have bene shifted. We opted to pause at that point as we a have large space into which SUPERFLICK can be placed for checkout. We will be working today (Wednesday as this is being written) to review plans for this evening. 
 
 
Wednesday - 10:00pm to midnight:- We will move a single core server to a lower level. This will create room for other pieces to be moved. Next come some firewalls, and we will move at least one out of hours. We will also move the existing FLICK up to be clear for SUPERFLICK to be added.
 
Update on Wednesday work - Easy - no action taken overnight.
During Wednesday we got SUPERFLICK into a temporary spot to enable first checkout tasks to be done. We reviewed the next steps and had a choice between undertaking some on Wednesday and the balance on Thursday, or do the lot on Thursday. The latter option is lower risk and has greater support available so we opted for that.
We are finalising plans for this evening. The first stage will cover the Wednesday steps of relocating some server and service assets. We will then move on to the originally plans Thursday steps. The Thursday plan below will be updated later in the day.  
 
 
Thursday - SUPERFLICK will be fitted and powered up. It is already configured. We will check it out then link it to FLICK. 10:00pm to midnight:- We will move the primiary uplink over to SUPERFLICK. Once that is verified then it is a relatively straightforward repatching from FLICK to SUPERFLICK. With that done we will monitor closely to ensure everything is behaving. The now retired FLICK will not be shut down or removed until Friday at the earliest.
 
Update on Thursday work - Work overnight took a lot longer. We left IDC at 04:00 with everything running. Impact to services was kept to a minimum as the moves took place.
Equipment was relocated to make way for SUPERFLICK to be fitted. Power delivery had to be rearranged as well. This was enabled by using standby equipment onhand. To keep services up as much as possible we utilised 'walking' them between locations. This and the additional time taken due to issues along the way mean we will be patching and tidying out of hours over the next week. This will result in brief outages of 1-2 minutes on services affected.
 
We did run into some issues with a fibre uplink which refused to play ball when we moved it across. Troubeshooting (which took time) saw us revert to a different configuration. We had to alter resources at another centre and this took time to arrange and access. A followup maintenance will be scheduled to bring the service fully up to the level we require.
 
Another milestone ticked off. Once the tidyups are completed we will roll on to the next project. If you have questions or want further information please get in touch.  
 
 
Yes this is a bit of a read. But for those who want to know it gives you additional information. It also gives a good overview of our plans for this change. As always if you have questions please make contact with us.