CA to WA Datacenter Migration

KH-Jonathan

CTO
Staff member
Dear Valued Customer,

We are excited to announce an upgrade in services for our West Coast customers. We will be performing upgrades on the underlying VPS infrastructure to ensure that all of our equipment and our networks stay up to date with the latest hardware and technology to guarantee the best user experience possible for our valued customers. This includes upgrading back end servers powering our VPS systems, upgrades to our network infrastructure equipment, power distribution equipment and our network connectivity.

To achieve these goals this will include a relocation of our customers from our facility in CA to our newly outfitted facility in WA. This transition allows us to provide our customers with a much broader mix of bandwidth ensuring stable and fast connections each and every time.

The mix of bandwidth includes direct connections to multiple Tier I providers such as Level3, NTT and TATA Communications. As well as Tier II networks such as Spectrum Networks and the Seattle Internet Exchange. The SIX provides more peering options and sometimes direct peering to a number of large networks located in the region including well known brands such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Inc and many more.

By now you're probably asking how this is going to impact you, as a customer. The simple answer is you won't notice a thing. We will be live migrating our customers to the equipment located in our facility in WA. In performing the migration this way you will not experience any downtime or service interruption. There will be no IP addresses to change, and your entire file system with all configuration files, settings and websites will be copied over without any risk of data loss.

This upgrade is scheduled to take place starting Monday, October 21st. We will be unable to give you a specific time or date when your particular VPS will be moved as this is a live migration and one VPS may take longer than another however rest assured our dedicated Systems Administrators will monitor this process to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Sincerely
KnownHost, LLC

UPDATE 11/19/13:
The overall migration is just over one quarter complete. Approximately 27%.
UPDATE 12/18/13:
The overall migration is approximately 43% complete.
UPDATE 1/6/14:
The overall migration is approximately 57% complete.
UPDATE 1/10/14:
The overall migration is approximately 64% complete.
UPDATE 2/3/14:
The overall migration is approximately 80% complete.
UPDATE 2/6/14:
The overall migration is approximately 85% complete.
UPDATE 2/10/14:
The overall migration is approximately 92% complete.
UPDATE 2/13/14:
I'm very happy to announce that the migration from CA to WA has been completed successfully. There are no longer any IP tunnels active and all connections are now direct to our servers in WA.
 
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Not thrilled. I chose KnownHost because your servers were close to my clients, mostly in Silicon Valley. Seattle is 400 miles further away. Is it likely we'll get quicker pings and faster throughput after this move?
 
@aaronlyon

I can definitely understand that. Here are some results based on some tests I just ran:

Santa Clara -> Seattle, WA: 42.1ms.
Santa Clara -> Los Angeles: 48ms.

Seattle actually has a better response to Santa Clara than LA does.
 
What about databases during the migration period? Specifically I'm concerned about e-commerce website transactions that are saved in the database. Is there any point during your migration process that the database records could get out of sync between the two datacenters?
 
@karlajw

We'll be using Virtuozzo's live migration features for the actual data transfer. This has always worked well for us allowing us to live migrate data - even InnoDB databases, without issues. You have nothing to worry about :)
 
It would have been nice to have a little more warning. We have migrations scheduled for the same time.. hopefully what you say is true in that it will be seamless. Hopefully that holds true if we are actively working on it.
 
It would have been nice to have a little more warning. We have migrations scheduled for the same time.. hopefully what you say is true in that it will be seamless. Hopefully that holds true if we are actively working on it.

This should pose no problem at all, so don't worry :)
 
Have you a test IP?

Will these so called "upgrades" include SSD options?

I don't have a test IP available there as of yet. With the way the migration is being done to prevent IPs from having to change I won't be able to provide one that directly routes to there for a little while, but I'll make one available just as soon as it's available.

SSDs becoming available on the West coast is part of the plan here. It won't be immediately as obviously the priority is getting the migration done without issues, but they will be available in WA hopefully very soon after this migration is complete.
 
I don't have a test IP available there as of yet...
Jonathan, which datacenter is it please? We'll know when we are there, so you might as well tell us know.
I'd like to get a test ip from their network.

I too chose CA to have instant latency here in Los Angeles.
I'd like to assess if WA make any more sense than Dallas from Los Angeles.
 
Will this new DC be the equivalent of the TX DC? I currently have my VPS in TX but having it be local would be very nice.
 
Thanks, would be helpful to have an ip to see if this is an improvement or not.

I'll post one as soon as I have one available.

Jonathan, which datacenter is it please? We'll know when we are there, so you might as well tell us know.
I'd like to get a test ip from their network.

I too chose CA to have instant latency here in Los Angeles.
I'd like to assess if WA make any more sense than Dallas from Los Angeles.

The actual datacenter the servers are in is the Seattle datacenter operated by TierPoint, which is the parent company of Colo4 which has been our datacenter in TX for many years.

The physical address is:

Fisher Plaza
140 4th Ave N.
Suite 360
Seattle, WA 98109

Will this new DC be the equivalent of the TX DC? I currently have my VPS in TX but having it be local would be very nice.

What do you mean equivalent? As far as quality goes, it's right there with it. The datacenter is operated by TierPoint which is the parent company of our datacenter (Colo4) in TX. The network mix is truly astounding - we'll be tied into the Seattle Internet Exchange (https://www.seattleix.net/)
 
Unfortunately for me at least, on the test IP/website I found hosted at TP, I see an increase in latenecy, an increase in hops and consistant issues on hops:

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms home.gateway [192.168.1.254]
2 46 ms 46 ms 46 ms lac.m2core.net.au [202.154.95.70]
3 46 ms 46 ms 46 ms 113.76.154.202.sta.commander.net.au [202.154.76.
113]
4 47 ms 46 ms 48 ms bundle-ether5-141.sydequ-inet3.m2core.net.au [20
2.128.112.29]
5 47 ms 46 ms 46 ms gigabitethernet2-6.ken12.sydney.telstra.net [203
.45.29.165]
6 47 ms 49 ms 48 ms tengige0-1-0-2.ken-core4.sydney.telstra.net [203
.50.20.1]
7 49 ms 50 ms 47 ms bundle-ether1.pad-gw2.sydney.telstra.net [203.50
.6.29]
8 50 ms 47 ms 47 ms 203.50.13.118
9 199 ms 197 ms 195 ms i-0-7-0-0.tlot-core01.bx.telstraglobal.net [202.
84.140.50]
10 196 ms 193 ms 195 ms i-0-0-0-3.eqla01.bi.telstraglobal.net [202.40.14
9.134]
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 194 ms * * if-4-28.tcore2.LVW-LosAngeles.as6453.net [216.6.
84.53]
13 223 ms 221 ms 222 ms if-2-2.tcore1.LVW-LosAngeles.as6453.net [66.110.
59.1]
14 221 ms 221 ms 226 ms if-3-2.tcore1.PDI-PaloAlto.as6453.net [66.198.12
7.25]
15 222 ms 222 ms 222 ms if-14-2.tcore1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net [64.86.123
.21]
16 221 ms 221 ms 221 ms if-11-0-0-5.core1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net [64.86.
124.25]
17 223 ms 222 ms 222 ms ix-4-0-0.core1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net [66.110.64
.14]
18 226 ms 222 ms 223 ms vlan19.sea-csr00.wdc01.adhost.net [173.240.48.4]

19 227 ms 222 ms 224 ms [removed]

Trace complete.
 
@Aussie_Boy

*'s in a traceroute don't necessarily indicate problems with the trace. Routers aren't required to answer trace packets, so often times they get discarded as low priority. *'s in traces are very common.

Unfortunately a few locations (your part of AU) being one will see slightly higher ping times (20-30ms is what we saw in most testing) but for the vast majority of the world there will be a decrease in response time or a nil change.

The routing into our network could very likely be different than the test IP on TP's website, but we won't know until I have a test IP I can give you.
 
My problem: its a good newsportal. Now in Hostgator...if any missing happened?...any downtime means huge loss...
 
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