PLANNED OUTAGES WEEK COMMENCING 12 SEPT - UPDATED

UPDATED 16 SEPT 2016 06:55

At 17:30 last night we commenced shutdown of our primary servers in preparation for this move. The colocation facility has confirmed that our servers have been moved however they were not turned back on until we requested it at 06:05 this morning. Tests confirm that all sites are now being served from our primary server set.

Analysis of our monitors show that a short loss of service was felt by users at 17:53 whilst the loss of the primary web server propagated through DNS. No interruption was experienced during the switch back as servers were added back in rather than removed.

We will continue to monitor site performance today but this topic can now be considered closed.  Should you require any further information please raise a helpdesk ticket.

UPDATED 9 Sept 2016 12:50

B2B has been planning a more automated failover set up for our main servers and we will be attempting to get this in to place before they are turned off.  This will enable alternative web servers to continue displaying web pages and taking orders during the time that the main servers are turned off, however the following services will be unavailable whilst the main servers are down.

1. Reporting Pages
2. EDI via text files (EDI for customers utilising WEB API's to interchange data with the web should operate normally)

As part of this set up process there may be occasional slow responses as we configure the appropriate links.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

We have been informed by the colocation company that manages the data centre where our main live servers are located that they will be undergoing some major maintenance next week.  As a part of that maintenance our hardware needs to be physically moved requiring a full power down. That move is scheduled to take place late on 15 Sept (23:00 BST) in to early 16 Sept (04:00 BST) giving an expected down time of up to 5 hours.

We are evaluating our options in switching processing to our disaster recovery servers for this period, although that in itself will require 2 separate outages to facilitate the switch each way. 

Any outages will be planned to take place outside the core business hours of 09:00-17:00 BST (08:00-16:00 UTC) and will be notified in this section of this site.

After the physical move our servers will be behind new network infrastructure in the colocation facility. We are informed that this will result in a more robust and faster reacting re-routing in the case of network challenges. We have had a number of connectivity blips (documented in this section) over the last few months relating to routing and this move should significantly reduce the impact of similar challenges in the future.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause our customers.