Major technical upgrades (Q3 2020)

Oppdatert

The remaining components of our major technical upgrades couldn’t be completed ahead of the data centre relocation, and are being completed over the next two weekends. As the severity of these works should be minimal (the bulk of the work has already been completed - ie. the shared hosting rebuild) we’re not going to schedule outage windows, but will proceed with the works with fallback plans ready to enact if we need them.

We’ll be sending a newsletter to our customers in due course explaining the improvements, upgrades and changes across the board, including how we’re going to be ready to help you moving forward and in to 2021.

They’re exciting times at LEOPARD.host where we remain 100% Australian family owned. We deeply appreciate your patience with us as we’ve interrupted 4-5 years of uptime to make sure we keep providing top-tier service.

If you’ve got any questions about your service, this email or anything else, please feel free to get in touch.

Cheers,
LEOPARD.host

Oppdatert

At last, we’re nearing the end of the road - thank you for your patience as we’ve overhauled our systems.

We’re expediting the remainder of these upgrade works due to the on-going DDoS attacks. Engineers will be at the Sydney facility from this evening (23rd of September) through to Monday (the 28th) in order to finalise the outstanding works. Part of this work will involve final audits ahead of our data centre relocation.

These final upgrade works involve replacing the hypervisors that underpin our Shared Hosting and Spam Filtering systems, as well as replacing our primary network switches to increase our maximum capacity to 20G. We’ve been proceeding with this work remotely (as much as possible) in order to minimise the time required on-site this week.

Although we don’t expect any problems, there could be unexpected problems so please prepare for additional interruptions during this maintenance window. We’ll be keeping outages to evenings/overnight in order to minimise disruption for our customers. Please let us know if you require special consideration.

Thank you,
LEOPARD.host

Oppdatert

Major upgrades involving our corporate/internal infrastructure have been completed overnight.
This involved a change to the hardware underpinning our staff- and customer-facing systems (ie. my.LEOPARD), as well as to the hypervisor between that hardware and our operating systems (it’s been a nice ride, VMware).

There were some interruptions to my.LEOPARD this morning, however all other functions remained online so the decision was made to persist and troubleshoot, rather than rolling back to the previous infrastructure. If you’re still experiencing problems with your account, please reach out to support@leopard.host ASAP.

At the start of the week, engineers successfully launched our rebuilt backup system to customer infrastructure.
Full, incremental and categorised backups are now taken at frequent intervals - you can access incremental backups every day across the board for 30 days, including weekly full backups for a fortnight. Feedback from customers has been positive, and performance has been consistently well ahead of the old system.

“Are we there yet?”

Our team are on-track to proceed with hypervisor replacements for our shared hosting and spam filtering infrastructure this weekend, including some customer VPS rebuilds/relocations to our new Dell host nodes.
This work will continue and conclude next weekend, ahead of our data centre migration the following weekend.
Our team are working to keep customer service impact within 10pm-4am AEST where possible.

Next weekend, our team will also be replacing current network switching hardware with HP Enterprise 10G switches that will allow us to further improve performance across the board. 2x redundant Brocade routers will remain upstream, providing redundant feeds in to our network. Once we then relocate to NEXTDC S2, our network will primarily be fibre-fed, with a few exceptions where it’s unnecessary due to current traffic volumes.

Thank you kindly for your patience as we’ve worked through this overhaul of our platforms. We’re looking forward to introducing you to our revitalised platforms, and empowering you to embrace them.

Cheers,
LEOPARD.host

Oppdatert

Engineers have made significant headway on these upgrades during the last week. We have had to source additional hardware which is now in-place for the major works to carry on.

Our new back-up system is on-track to launch next week (14-18 September 2020), and we’ll be finalising our network and hypervisor changes in the following 2 weekends (19-20 Sep & 26-27 Sep).

These major upgrades will all be completed ahead of our relocation from Equinix SY4 to NEXTDC S2 on the first weekend of October - being Friday the 2nd to Sunday the 4th of October 2020. We can’t wait!

We’ll continue to update this post as we progress, and will raise events for the critical works as they occur.

Should you have any queries or concerns, please reach out to our local team.

Thank you,
LEOPARD.host

Løst

Our engineers made significant headway over the weekend, however due to time and facility constraints they weren’t able to complete the works in full. They will return this weekend (4-6 September 2020) to further progress (or complete) the works - it is anticipated that they will be able to complete the works as-planned.

A new issue will be raised for the 2nd phase of these Q3 2020 technical upgrades that will see our platforms overhauled in readiness for our recent growth to continue as we move in to Q4 and very shortly into 2021.

Please stay tuned for updates. Thank you for your patience as we undertake these critical works for you.

Cheers,
LEOPARD.host

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Startet
Planlagt vedlikehold

As demand for LEOPARD.host services continues to soar, we’re investing in a complete overhaul of our hosting and cloud infrastructure ahead of our relocation from Equinix SY4 to NEXTDC S2 in early October 2020.

We’ve been working in the background preparing for these works in an effort to reduce delays during these upgrades. These works will result in a set of platforms that are ready to scale rapidly in response to the demand for our services - after plenty of research and testing, we’re happy to proceed with these works as-planned.

In an industry fraught with acquisitions from off-shore competitors, we’re proud to remain 100% Australian family owned and operated. Our customers come first, and we’re looking forward to the end result of these technical upgrades, as it will allow greater self-service control and even more reliable services across the board.

These works include:

  1. Replacement of VPS host nodes with new Dell multi-node hardware (Intel Xeon, Intel DC SSDs)
  2. Overhaul of underlying networking infrastructure; moving to HP Enterprise switching (10G/1G)
  3. Changes to the hypervisor systems used across our customer and corporate platforms (various)
  4. Back-up system overhaul on to new Dell hardware, using JetBackup 4.x & sync automation methods
  5. Introducing further redundancy for our corporate infrastructure, to make my.LEOPARD more resilient
  6. Preparations to begin ground-work to deploy our own Australian network (via AS138521) in 2021-2022

We have scheduled up to 3 weekends of work at the data centre to facilitate these upgrades. At the moment, we’re limited as to how we can organise the works as Equinix have removed all access to conference rooms, etc, due to COVID-19, so we’re not able to set-up for major works as we would usually do. Engineers will be working around these difficult restrictions, and our managed customers will remain able to ring through to our NOC.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support team.

We’ll update this event as we progress. Please expect interruptions over these weekends.

Thank you,
LEOPARD.host

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