Datacentre upgrade: turning the page

Over the past few months, the whole HaiSoft team has been busy upgrading our infrastructure, as part of our ongoing commitment to improving our services. Find all the details and photos in this article.

A new home

After 10 years in the Cogent datacentre in Vélizy, we needed a fresh start to build new momentum for the next 10 years!

We quickly decided to migrate our infrastructure to a new datacentre: a new site and a new space to house our machines and to welcome our technicians whenever they work on keeping our servers online and providing you with the best possible service.

This choice brings many benefits: it opens up new prospects for the future of HaiSoft, in a more modern working and production environment, of more recent design and therefore more efficient.
Among other things, it offers:
a Tier 2 design with redundant power and cooling;
racks with thermal aisle containment, like those in the Tours datacentre, which have proven their worth since our migration to Cyrès (you can read the article by clicking here);
racks fitted with STS (Static Transfer Switches), which in particular provide power redundancy for servers that only have a single power supply;
and, to name just one more, safer, simpler and smoother on-site access for our technicians, which improves their quality of life at work, one of HaiSoft's core values.

In short: a better quality of service for you, our customers, and a better quality of working life for the people who answer your questions every day and keep your machines running at their best.

A better quality of service for you, our customers.

New projects

We knew that an operation of this kind would lead us to thoroughly rethink our installations and the architecture of our racks, and beyond that, all of our services. From the outset, we intended to take the opportunity to review – and, where possible, improve – the way we manage our server fleet.

With this in mind, we redesigned the network diagrams of our racks to eliminate any potential bottlenecks, provide better redundancy for network components and improve performance; we then replaced our network equipment accordingly (switches, routers, cabling, etc.), and finally took the opportunity to plan ahead and redo the cabling of our racks properly, just as we had previously done in the Tours datacentre.

A second project involved replacing the virtualisation technology used for our hypervisors. Until now, our shared hosting servers and VMs ran on QEMU-KVM.

Committed to using and promoting open-source solutions, and after extensive in-house testing, we drew on our considerable experience in Windows virtualisation (offered through HaiSoft Maintenance for a few months now!) and chose to migrate our shared hosting servers and VMs to new, more powerful servers running Proxmox.
This allows us, now and in the future, to gain in reliability, efficiency and scalability, and also to manage our virtualisation servers as a cluster (seamless or near-seamless migrations, high availability, fast restores, etc.).

Proxmox lets us imagine a whole new ecosystem of services, and our teams are particularly excited about it!
We will come back to these new possibilities in a dedicated article soon.

Last but not least, we replaced a large share of our servers' IP addresses – those belonging to Cogent – so that we now use our own IP addresses rather than another provider's. We are proud to announce that HaiSoft is a member of RIPE and, as such, manages and uses its own IPv4 addresses.

This was a demanding operation, for you as well as for us (we were using several IP blocks – each with up to 254 usable addresses – that had to be replaced on your servers, amounting to several hundred IPs). It was completed within a few weeks and without any noticeable interruption for you: a real challenge.
We also offer our own IPv6 addresses and plan to roll out IPv6 more widely across our servers over the coming weeks. If you are interested, do not hesitate to contact our support team: we will be happy to guide you through this important step towards the Internet of tomorrow.

Proxmox: an exciting new ecosystem of services!

How it went: a smooth transition

The operation began in July with the delivery of the new racks and getting used to the new secure access procedures, followed by the cabling and installation of the new equipment, network equipment in particular, in the new racks.
A cross-connect was then set up between the two datacentres, so that the network (the old IP addresses) could be used transparently from the new datacentre for the duration of the migration.
From there, we were able to test the robustness of the new installation and fine-tune the final settings.
Then came the heaviest part of the operation: in early August, during a first night-time intervention, we moved most of the servers to the new datacentre. The equivalent of 2 racks, between 70 and 80 servers, were physically moved that night without any major incident. It is a complex, high-pressure step: downtime must be kept to an absolute minimum to limit service interruption, while staying ready to react to any problems (hardware failures, configuration issues, logistical problems, etc.).
From October to November, we replaced the IP addresses used by the servers one by one, switching to our own IPs and preparing the final stage of the migration: moving full network management to the new datacentre.
The last night-time intervention took place on 28 November: we moved the last servers to the new datacentre and disconnected the old network equipment, as well as the cross-connect.

Unplugging the last cable from the last Cogent rack, the main rack of our former infrastructure for the past 10 years, brought a great sense of relief and pride at having completed this project successfully.

Unplugging the last cable from the last rack: a source of pride and relief.

New momentum

We are delighted to share with you this summary of an operation that lasted almost 6 months and marked our year 2023. It closes 10 years of collaboration with Cogent and opens a new partnership, heralding new momentum for us and for you.
We believe we have found a new partner who is closer to us, with strong local roots, and who will be able to meet our new expectations.

What's next?

We intend to make the most of this new opportunity to offer you new and better services, ever more reliable and efficient.

What's next? A new partnership, new momentum.

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