That’s ‘Outage’, not ‘Outrage’. I’m outraged most of the time, so there’s no news there.

We’ve been informed by our data centre that they are having a problem which can only be solved by the complete replacement of a unit, rather than a repair. So they are beginning to follow the Volkswagen Franchises Dealer model of no longer being a garage, just a place that slots in replacement parts. They don’t repair things any more. I guess something might break down, and then they might get sued, so it’s all our fault really.

This is what our data centre tells us:

As you are aware it is our intention to entirely replace the unit which caused disruption to services this week. We have a plan in place that rather than work around a complete outage for all customers, instead a controlled migration of individual cabinets to new supplies will be conducted. This will reduce downtime for individual cabinets and allow engineers to respond to any individual issues should they arise. 

Delivery and commissioning (including testing and verification) of the new device will take place over Wednesday/Thursday next week, with the migration of customer circuits to a clean supply occurring over the evening of Friday. Please note that these timings are approximate at this time and are still subject to change,  however i wanted to give everyone a chance to have as much notice as possible prior to the work starting. 

I will issue a further communication early next week confirming precise windows for the work to be completed in and also raise individual tickets with affected customers in order to arrange clean shutdown and restart procedures for devices.

Well, all that tells me is that there’s a vague chance we might be offline for a while late next week. fotoLibra hasn’t been affected by this problem as yet, and there’s no real reason to think we will, as we appear to be in a different sector, so this is just a heads up. If you come across fotoLibra behaving strangely, it should clear itself up within 24/48 hours.

Apologies in advance!