Yet Another Network Upgrade (Possible Downtime Warning)

We’re doing some more work on our core network this week, as we finally get to put our new Juniper routers live.
There shouldn’t be any network downtime, as BGP should allow us simply to route the traffic elsewhere while making the changes, however when there are computers and humans involved you can never be sure
So to that end we are issuing the following maintenance notification:
When: Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th of June (2007)
Time: 23:00 – 01:00
During this period we intend to switch off the BGP sessions on the router that is being replaced. We’ll lose Level(3) and Smart telecom. If Tiscali (our third carrier) have any issues, we could potentially loose international connectivity for a time during the upgrade. All INEX connectivity will not be affected during this upgrade. We estimate 10 – 15 minutes where we will be “at risk” during the swap over.
What:
We are upgrading our edge routers to Juniper Service Routers from their current configuration. This will happen in two stages,
1 which will happen in the above time slot and the other during another time slot that has yet to be decided upon. There are several reasons for upgrading to Juniper service routers.
a) Additional port density, this means we can add more carriers, a second INEX connection and also take on services like Packet Exchanges eXpand and ProXimity services to give us further reach through global private peering.
b) As part of our ever expanding network we have to take into consideration our growth. Our traffic to the general internet has more than doubled in the past 12 months. These new service routers will allow us to continue this growth.
c) INEX are adding a second physical network, similar to LINX in London, and we’ll have our second connection to that. This’ll give us more capacity on INEX but also give us much greater redundancy and remove the single point of failure that we currently have.