Moving our hardware to Europe

For the last half of a year I've been studying routes and ping statistics from all over the world to Russia, France and Germany. Monitoring showed that routes to Russia changed and sometimes they even cross another countries, packet loss also happens in the evening (for example Belarus and Kazakhstan). According to statistics, we have only 54% players from Russia, 6% from asian countries, others come from the western countries.
I have been thinking how to solve this, and decided to move our web-resources and a part of logon realms to central Europe, to one of the OVH data centres. If something goes wrong and it won't help - we can always come back.

It will give us:

- More stable routes and more stable ping from any part of the world, I haven't noticed any problems on routes to central Europe for the last half of a year, including routes from eastern Russia.
- Full access for foreign players, if we tried to do this before - location of our equipment made some problems, because routes from Europe and other countries to Moscow are awful so is the ping.
- Using more powerful equipment. Though exchange rates is high, it is not more expensive to locate in Europe than it is in Russia, but we can use hi-end platforms with new Intel E5-1650v3 processors and DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz memory.

How ping will change:

- For russian and asian players ping will increase by 30-50ms with stable route, but it can be even better for those players who had packet loss and incorrect route.
- For players from countries that are on the west from Russia (except eastern Ukraine), ping should decrease by 10-40ms, because the equipment will now stay at western Europe not in eastern one.
- For players from USA and Latin America ping will decrease by 50-100ms, and will be 80-150ms so they will be able to play at our server.

I want to say, that even 50ms difference will not be felt, because ping will be stable, without spikes and losses and server delay will also decrease after we start using up to date platforms with DDR4 2133 MHz memory. Our tests showed that memory frequency influences performance, for example when there were RAM chips with 1600, delay was lower in 1.5 times than with 1066.
You can check your ping and speed there: http://proof.ovh.net/. You should choose server (Server Selection button), pick SBG Strasbourg and click OK, and launch test. If your ping is lower tan 150ms and your speed is higher than 3Mbit/s (if your provider can have such speed), you will have no problems.

How we will move:

We already have access to every equipment that we need in OVH and today we customize it, so tomorrow we will just need to move actual database.
Tomorrow (17.12.15) in the morning, from 08:00 (Moscow Time) we will begin transfer, realms and web-resources (site, forum, control panel) will be unavailable for a 2-8 hour period (different for each resource, due to DB size), and by 16:00 (MT) everything should work fine in OVH.