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An Important Notice about Upcoming Maintenance and Upgrades


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Hi everyone!
      We've heard from a lot of you that you are looking for more transparency and information about what we are doing here at 2600Hz to enhance your experience, your software and your ability to generate revenue. I wanted to let you know that we've been heads down on making that happen for quite a while now. We're now at a point where we have some new stuff rolling off the "assembly line" that we want to tell you about.

      We'll be sending out a more formal notification about maintenance and upgrades to everyone (via email and the announcements page here) shortly, but in the meantime, the first thing I wanted to give you a heads up on is our datacenter upgrade project.

       For those of you hosted in our datacenters, we're excited to tell you that we're upgrading to new hardware, new racks and faster internet peering connectivity with our upstream providers. All of this is supposed to be transparent to you, but will pave the way for us to start rolling out more software and hardware based features, while also speeding up our systems. There are two products in particular that these upgrades will allow us to rollout, and I think you will like those features a lot... but we need the space to get them done. Once we're upgraded, we'll announce the new features.

     We will also be opening a new facility in Chicago and moving out of our old Rackspace facility. This will result in some new IP addresses for where we send audio from (the SIP signaling addresses won't change). So we're giving you as much notice about this as possible for any of you who have clients that maintain firewalls and strict security access rules. I'll be publishing the new IP ranges shortly.

    You don't need to do anything to prepare for this upgrade (unless your clients have super strict firewall security and demand knowing every IP you use). The changes should just happen. There will be a brief maintenance period where we will need to take our load balancers offline (one datacenter at a time/weekend), but if you've programmed your phones with a failover load balancer then your customers won't notice a thing. If you haven't, they'll have a tiny bit of downtime but it will be after standard business hours and you can notify them in advance of the work. We can also help you re-provision phones to an alternate datacenter in advance, as needed.

      We're targeting the first move for our New York datacenter on Friday, 5/6 in the evening. We're hoping to move our Silicon Valley datacenter on Friday, 5/31 in the evening as well. We'll be turning up our Chicago datacenter sometime in May as well but that one won't impact anyone or have any downtime, just new IPs that we'll start sending traffic from. And again, we'll publish a full list of our new IPs so everyone has them.

       You shouldn't need to change any DNS entries, branding, portals, etc. and there will not be a software upgrade during this period - just the same software (for now) on new hardware and in new racks at our datacenters.

        I wanted to post this here in case folks had questions and also to give you all "first dibs" notice at what's happening. This work has been in planning and negotiation stages since January and our team has a solid plan for making this all happen fairly transparently, but we're always happy to hear about ideas and concerns, so let me know!

        This is a big project coming to completion, and it will allow us to finally start rolling out features that some of you have been waiting for (for many months in some cases), so I'm excited for the next few months. Going to get very busy around here, so stay tuned!

        Thank you all for your continued support of our platform, our products and our services. Without you, none of this would be possible!
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  • 3 weeks later...
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Just an update on this. The first phase of this migration was completed this weekend. Shout out to our new operations wizard, Derek, for handling all this and doing a bang-up job.

Derek moved roughly 1,000 pounds of gear, re-wired over 200 cables, coordinated over four simultaneous vendor "cut-overs" and performed all the prep, testing and work afterward. He also upgraded the network environment to support more advanced VLAN capabilities (more about this soon) and GigE ports (more about this soon as well).

Considering all that occurred, we had two firewall rules accidentally lost on server reboots and one faulty network switch cable. While this did cause some disruption today *sigh* it overall was not too shabby, Derek!


The next round of datacenter equipment moves will be on May 27th. More details pending but please let your clients know as early as you can that maintenance will occur between the 27th and the 29th. This time, it will be in Santa Clara (west coast).
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