This post appeared on the Slicehost forums and is reproduced here for archival purposes.

This is an exciting time for our Slicehost customers. Slicehost and Rackspace joined forces in late 2008 and Slice technology is at the core of Rackspace Cloud Servers, one of the world’s largest compute clouds.

We have spent the last 2-1/2 years improving and building on top of it, and it is now time to bring those benefits to our Slicehost customers. Change brings with it some measure of uncertainty and my goal with this post is to explain the advantages of the move to Cloud Servers, as well as what we are doing to make the transition as smooth as possible.

If at the end you still have outstanding questions or concerns, we will also be hosting a live Q&A where you can ask questions and get answers real-time. Stay tuned for more info on that. Our goal is full transparency and for you to have all the information you need to understand and feel comfortable with the move.

STL-A and STL-B Migration

Our oldest, most loyal Slicehost customers are in STL-A and STL-B, the original Slicehost DCs. Beginning roughly in September, 2011, we will begin migrating all STL-A andSTL-B customers to Rackspace’s Chicago DC. If you are affected you will receive more detailed communication, but for now please consider the following advantages of this data center migration:

1. New server hardware. The STL-A and STL-B DCs house the oldest server hardware we operate across our entire Slicehost and Cloud Servers server fleet. Customers will be migrated to our latest generation server hardware, which means better performance for your instances as well as fewer hardware failures.
2. Rackspace DCs. STL-A and STL-B are colocation facilities. Rackspace operates top tier datacenters that we manage and control. Our Chicago DC, where STL-A and STL-B customers will be migrated to, is our newest, latest generation DC.
3. More bandwidth. Since Rackspace DCs are larger they benefit from economies of scale, including bandwidth. This means more bandwidth is available for your applications as well as absorbing DDOS attacks.
4. Private, pervasive network by default. In STL-A and STL-B a private, unmetered interface was not provided by default. It had to be manually requested, and even then large customers may have crossed a boundary where private communication between all slices was not possible. In Rackspace DCs a private interface is included by default and slices can communicate via unmetered (i.e. free) bandwidth to any other slice you instantiate within the DC.

The initial migration plan involved changing both public as well as private IPs (for customers that have them). We heard loud and clear that preserving IPs was important. I am happy to report that we’ve gone back to the drawing board and have figured out a way to keep the public IPs for all STL-B slices.

Unfortunately, for a number of technical and non-technical reasons (not the least of which being that we do not own the IP blocks), we cannot keep public IPs for STL-A customers (over 4/5s of all STL slices are in STL-B). Private IPs for all STL-A and STL-B slices (again, those that have them) will need to change, but the majority of the concern is around public IPs.

More detailed info will follow as we get closer to September, but we are working very hard to make the DC migration as smooth and painless as possible. Our plan is to offer you a window in which you can self-migrate at your convenience. If any slices are remaining in STL after the window we will migrate them for you. After the DC migration you will continue under the Slicehost billing model.

Cloud Servers Migration

After the STL migrations our next priority for Slicehost customers is getting them on Rackspace Cloud Servers. We are still working through the details but we plan to offer a similar model of self-migration, at your convenience, followed by Rackspace migrating remaining slices. This should begin sometime in late 2011 or early 2012. More info to follow as we get closer.

Thanks for reading this. I hope it’s been helpful. We truly value you as a customer and believe you will benefit from the move to Cloud Servers and the Rackspace Cloud. We are excited about what we are building and every one of us cares about you, our customers who use them. If you have any questions feel free to comment (so others can see as well) and we’ll respond. If you’d prefer you can also email me directly at erik.carlin at rackspace dot com.

Erik
@ecarlin

(Thread comments)