DH4 was brought online in March 2013 to ease capacity issues in our LON3 Data Centre caused by extensive growth. At that stage LON5 was still in the initial design phase. It is a colocation facility in very close proximity to LON3.

Your migration date will be determined by the location of your solution. Rackspace is working hard to ensure the maintenance has minimal impact to you, and you will receive a ticket in your Cloud Control Panel with additional details 21 days before your scheduled maintenance.

1. After your instance is migrated, the affected devices will be securely transported to the new Data Centre facility.
2. All devices will be reconnected and powered back up.
3. Your configuration will be tested and verified at an infrastructure level.

Yes. The total scheduled migration window will be four hours but our goal is to return to service as quickly as possible. Rackspace has designed the migration plan to occur in small contiguous blocks in order to minimize the amount of downtime for customers. Our project plan also seeks to reduce the amount of unplanned downtime by including additional resources and multiple contingency plans.

If your instance is not able to go through the live migration process, you will be notified via a ticket within your Cloud Control Panel and a standard migration will be scheduled.

No. You should be able to retain your IPs and DNS with this migration. If your server is not able to retain its original IPs, you will be notified via ticket and Support will work with you to resolve.

The migrations will begin in September and continue through October 2015. You will receive a notification via ticket on the Rackspace customer portal 21 days in advance of your migration date. Subsequent tickets will include the date range in which you will be migrated.

We encourage you to make your own offsite backups and use the Managed Backup solution that Rackspace offers. If your solution is not currently being backed up, we strongly recommend that you talk to your Rackspace Account Team to put backup methods in place before the migration date.

Because we must move hardware according to its network topography, we cannot offer flexible move dates to customers.

The answer depends on where those solutions are physically located within the data centre. Dedicated hardware will be moved before Cloud hardware, so they will be handled in two different maintenance windows.

There will be no change to any of the services that you currently consume.

Rackspace is investing heavily in the design and construction of the LON5 Data Centre and in our partnership with Digital Realty Trust, a company dedicated to data centre design and construction. The lease associated with the LON5 Data Centre is in excess of 20 years. We hope that this provides you with some reassurance that we are making every effort not to migrate you again in the near future.

This facility is located near Crawley, Sussex. For security reasons, we have not published the address in this FAQ. You can obtain the address from your Account Team on a confidential basis and with valid justification, such as the need to coordinate the installation of private circuits.

Yes. The LON5 Data Centre provides the same or improved levels of redundancy, and more resilience in its electrical and mechanical infrastructure, than LON1 and LON3. Security protocols and operations for LON5 are in line with all data centres in the Rackspace global portfolio.

All Rackspace entities implement uniform global data centre security and environmental controls in their data centres.

The new LON5 Data Centre will have the standard security controls that have been implemented in our other data centres and that have been assessed in those other data centres as meeting the requirements of our ISO 27001, PCI-DSS SP L1, and ISAE / SSAE standards.

LON5 successfully passed the external assessment against ISO 27001, prior to opening to our customers. Rackspace will continue auditing externally, in line with our set annual compliance schedule.

Customers will be able to receive a copy of our ISO 27001 certificate, as well as an attestation from our Compliance Director that states that the appropriate security and environment controls have been implemented to meet the PCI-DSS SP L1 and ISAE / SSAE standards to which we adhere.

LON5 came online in the middle of the Rackspace ISAE / SSAE annual audit cycle and will therefore not be assessed upon opening.

The reporting period for the Rackspace Service Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 reports is 31 September to 1 October. The assessment will be conducted by our auditors between September and November 2015, with the final report being made available in early December 2015.

LON5 came online prior to the Rackspace Annual PCI-DSS Service Provider audit.

The PCI-DSS SP L1 external audit took place between May and July 2015. The Attestation of Compliance will be available for customers by the end of July or early August 2015.

In support of our commitment to our customers, Rackspace employees, and the environment, the LON3 Data Centre and UK head office (LON4) are certified to the international environmental management standard, ISO 14001, which provides a framework for managing our environmental responsibilities, including energy and waste management. We will extend the scope of this to LON5 in the next audit cycle. In the meantime, following are some of the initiatives we have implemented in LON5 to reduce our carbon footprint:

• The data centre construction will have a BREEAM rating of Very Good. BREEAM for new construction covers items such as environmentally sourced paint, LED lighting, minimising land fill, and impact on the environment during construction.
• LON5 will have an annualised Power Usage Effectiveness (PuE) of 1.15, as opposed to a rating of 1.58 in LON3.
• The removal of the mechanical cooling systems in the data halls means we can maintain a more stable PuE rating for the facility.
• The indirect cooling solution uses much lower water quantities than other systems in its class and significantly less water than a cooling tower.
• Rain harvesting will be leveraged and used in back-of-house amenities and for the adiabatic spray in the indirect cooling solution.
• Sun pipes in some areas will bring in natural light to reduce the need for artificial lighting.
• Power will be pulled into the site from higher up the grid to attain a more efficient delivery of power to the site.

You can submit a ticket to your Account Team in the Cloud Control Panel.

Customers who connect their Dedicated and Cloud hardware via RackConnect will only be impacted by the migration of Dedicated hardware.