Integra Telecom™ | AllStream™ to MagicJack™

The bottom line: to go from ~$450 per month to ~$150 per month is a big savings for combined Telecom, Internet and Web Application Services.

 

Integra Monthly Break Down

EOC 10/10 $399

4 Telephone Lines $20 each

3 set of 8 IPs (6 useable) $15 each

Discounts applied

Total about ~$450 per month

 

New Solution

2 each MagicJack $20 / year

1 each Charter Internet $40/month

1 each Nearly Static IP / free

1 each AWS EC2 Cloud, $100/month, t3.Large

Total about ~$150/month

 

If you are in the mood to switch your Internet and Telecom from a carrier who has been good for the last 10 years and is changing gears, Integra Telecom has been a great solution for so many in Reno Nevada since 2005. Yet, in the last few years they have been changing gears to more cloud based services, being bought and sold again by various larger organizations and their teams come and going, shrinking and growing and shrinking again.

 

MIGRATION OF ALL SERVICES FROM INTEGRA NETWORK

Alas, my experience to transition from them my 400+ clients has been pretty smooth. I was one of the last 8 clients in Reno Nevada, and you can now make that 7 clients. My contract was up October 11th, my 3rd contract, each of 3 years dating back to 2009. It took 30 days advance planning and 30 days of waiting to let things transition for the phones, and a 5 day blackout window for the mainlines.

 

The transition was not too bad, but the black out of my two main lines was sort of hard to be patient for especially when its good to have the phones ring all the for business, and when quiet, one gets a vacation of sorts.

 

BLACKOUT TIMING

The blackout was over a long weekend so that was good, Veteran's Day Weekend, going offline from Friday nite through Tuesday night, sort of long but sort of normal from what Magic Jack told me.

 

Alas, to have 21 IP address migrated, 7 servers migrated, 41 web applications migrated, and then all the application testing and confirmations; that was challenging but doable.

 

MY PLAN & MIGRATION STEPS

1. Verify out of contract with provider Integra. It happened before where I was out of contract and renewed to get better bandwidth when the local providers were still cost prohibitive and could not provide me the IP space I need for applications, and the cloud services were not mature enough to trust.

2. 18 months prior knowing it would take three 6 month periods to finalize and stabilize new technologies with customers; using our internal needs as a test case. Once we started and finished testing the new internal technologies that could be migrated from Windows 1998/2000/2003 platforms to Windows 2008/2012/2016 platforms as well as CentOS Linux platforms, we migrated a few minor and low risk customers to the new platform and waited a few weeks and documented, streamlined all of our support and business continuity and disaster recovery steps in case we needed to migrate to a new platform.

3. Regarding Cloud Services, mind you, we tested two cloud services directly, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS EC2 and was fundamentally happier with EC2 over Azure because of interface speed, launch and configuration simplicity, easy to understand costing and billing reporting, the metrics detail reporting needs some help because even when enabled it is not obvious.

4. Regarding Internet Services, stick with Charter Internet at 100/10 speeds

5. Regarding Email Services, migrate from Exchange and PostOffice to hMailServer

6. Regarding Web Services, migrate from on premises 2008/2012/2016 servers to AWS EC2 servers.

7. Regarding AWS EC2, allocate to Static Addresses, and assign Forward and Request Reverse DNS on each of them as email services, a primary and secondary MX configuration

8. With the primary EC2 server configuration launched from an AMI Windows 2012 R2 base, finish configuration and then create a new private AMI image based on the running EC2 instance that you can Launch for the second server and then assign the second static IP that has the forward and reverses for your second MX configuration or use it for your backup for the primary server. Remind yourself that your DNS MX should be already setup to be priority 0 through 10 for the primary MX, and then 11 through 30 for the secondary MX and so on and so forth.

9. Migrate data that you need, archive the rest, and transfer old stale donated and free web hosting accounts of content no longer valid applicable as paying customers, and redirect them to Yelp applicable landing pages

10. Wrap up the migration, write the lessons learned postmortem report, and file. Update documentation and continue to test and nudge and adjust as needed.

 More to Come...