We received notice from SoftLayer that there will be some private network maintenance this Saturday for a 1 hour window starting at 1AM Pacific Time.  The notice only affects a couple of our On-Demand resources.  In the past, private network maintenance has been about 50/50 in affecting public network connectivity.

Here’s a copy of the notice we received:

Date: 07/18/2009
Start time (PDT): 01:00:00
End time (PDT): 02:00:00
Services affected: Back End / Private network
Location: Seattle, WA
Duration: 1 hour
=====================================
SoftLayer Engineers will be replacing the upstream
back end / private aggregate switch that provides
connectivity to the rack level switch to which
your server is connected.

During this maintenance, customers will not have
access to back end / private services (DNS,
updates, update servers, NAS, iSCSI, etc). While
the maintenance window is set for 1 hour, we
expect no longer than 10 – 15 minutes of downtime.
=====================================

Update:

Employee Response – 2009-Jul-15 18:47 (GMT-0800) [Update 2]
Due to unforeseen issues, Softlayer Network Engineers replaced fas01.sr01.sea01 starting at 5:59pm PDT after the device suffered multiple crashes after opening this ticket to scheduling the maintenance. At 6:06pm PDT the replacement switch finished booting and all connectivity was restored to the backend network. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

- Network Engineering

-Jeff@WGM