Amsterdam all-nighter
Not the data centre.
We acquired our Amsterdam presence in 2017 as part of our acquisition of BHost. We integrated it into our core network and migrated all customers onto our own virtual server platform.
Since then, we’ve refreshed much of our London data centre space with our data centre expansions to Telehouse and City Lifeline including moving to fully-routed networking.
Our Amsterdam site was next in line for an upgrade, but it’s location presented some logistical challenges. Firstly, it’s a bit tricky for us to get to. Secondly, the Amsterdam data centre freeze meant that we couldn’t follow our preferred approach of deploying new kit in an adjacent empty rack, migrating, and then decommissioning the old space. The upgrade had to be done in-place, which is unavoidably more disruptive.
In order to minimise the impact of this, we ended up doing the vast majority of the work in a single, overnight session.
The end result is a very substantial upgrade to our Amsterdam site. As well as the deployment of our new networking platform, the virtual server hosts have been replaced with faster, more power efficient models. Existing customers have been live-migrated onto the new servers which feature all NVMe storage for much faster IO. In the new year, we have further capacity due to be installed and we will fully decommission the previous generation of servers. Whilst using low carbon energy to power servers is good, not using energy is even better.
This upgrade was months in the planning, including co-ordinating shipment of the new servers from a local supplier, and working closely with Equinix staff to perform the PDU swap. An earlier preparatory trip to (amongst other things) identify the best local pizza suppliers was also essential. We’re very grateful to the staff that put in some very long hours to make it go so smoothly.