WWII Online’s Portland Move (Update)

The move to Portland is well underway with servers being configured here locally, our new colocation (server housing facility) established and our new internet service and cross-connect pulled to our cabinet and ready to go. We have a couple of very basic pictures to show you today as installation of network and server equipment approaches quickly. This has been made possible thanks to all of those who participated in the recent fundraiser initiative, and to that end I’d like to thank you and share this update to show your contributions being put to work. All of us at Cornered Rat Software would like to wish you and your families a very Happy Thanksgiving.

THE CABINET

Here’s a quick look at the cabinet, while mostly empty, this will start to get filled quickly. You’ll notice power strips on the left and the right of the cabinet. This angle is from the rear perspective. On the front side you’ll see a vertical wire, on it you’ll see three sensors. This is used for monitoring cooling which will then trigger the center’s AI software to automatically conduct cooling and heat management, which is very cool and robust. Cool air is brought in from the ground floor and pushed through the cabinet while the hot air is vacuumed out the back side. This is called “Cold aisle-containment.”

POWER DISTRIBUTION UNITS (PDUs)

All cabling comes from the ground floor, and the PDUs are connected there. The redundant power is essential in the case of an emergency or failure of a PDU, systems will remain powered until a quick replacement can occur, resulting into greater up-time of WWII Online services and better crisis management for CRS. Fortunately, this facility is a 100% power SLA (service level agreement) which means their facility has multiple layers of fail-over for power on their end. 

The yellow cable you see is the new fiber line for our incoming internet we’re using which will be quickly put into our NEW Router, which we’re very excited about. Don’t worry, the caps on the fiber line are still there and it’s completely safe and locked up in that position.

NEW ROUTER & SWITCHES

We’ve purchased an all-new router giving us amazing insights on packet data, enabling us to provide better services to you. It’s also substantially more power efficient and takes up only 1U instead of 6U’s (if you’re familiar with that lingo). It offers 1 Gigabit throughput and that’s our ISP speed as well.

The switches we’re also pretty excited about, as we’ve created a connection between them that is at 10 Gigabit speeds, which means internal network traffic just got expanded 10x compared to our current Dallas setup. This will remove any critical data transfer bottlenecks that may have existed historically, once again giving CRS a huge hand in doing a better job for you.

Of course we’ll be creating all-new cabling throughout the new WWII Online home base, and we’ll test all those cables before getting installed to ensure maximum speeds and integrity of their builds.

Yes, the cabling will look much tighter than this picture. This picture was taken at the staging area during the pre-colo configuration process to get a head start on the installation / meeting the timelines.

GENERAL TRANSITION PLAN

By December 31st 2019, we must be vacated from Dallas entirely. Therefore Portland will need to be setup in advance, and we’ll have to transfer services over the web during that time. We’ll start out with some smaller web services and one of the last items will be the campaign itself, as it will cause a direct impact on jumping on the server and playing. We’ll try to give everyone some more notice as to when this will happen and help set some better expectations in terms of how long that down-time will actually be.

For now, installing the network equipment into Portland is our primary goal, ensuring connectivity and getting all of the routing rules established. We have several recently decommissioned servers inbound to Portland (from Dallas) that met our new standard requirements (redundant power, solid specs ~ recent servers purchased from a prior funding campaign). 

High Command Officers will need to make any order of battle changes now as those old tools are incapable of being virtualized and that server will need to be shipped from Dallas to Portland. There will be about a 2 week down-time on those tools for both sides, so document your chain of command, graduate all necessary cadets, and make any orbat moves necessary to be done NOW. Community Management team will be able to make manual moves if they’re urgently required, but it’s very time intensive for them to manage both sides plus OCS.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING SOLDIERS

I hope this Thanksgiving is full of great feasts and fellowship for you all. For us at CRS, we’ll be trying to take it easy but there’s obviously a lot to do and we’re laser focused on the mission to improve your services.

I hope this update is well received before the big Turkey day. Your support is tremendously appreciated and is making all of this possible. If you’ve not yet updated your billing method, please see to doing that asap to make sure your subscription is active. Reminder: All users who were subscribed in September and October need to update their billing method to stay relevant on our new system.

Thank you everyone, S!