The decision to move your IT infrastructure from one data center to another is not one that ever should be taken lightly. There can be a considerable investment in planning time and personnel, and there is usually some downtime unless you have purchased twice as much equipment as is needed to do a live cutover. However, by planning it well you can minimize the negative factors and make the transition painless.

We ended up needing to move data centers twice in one year, and our planning made both moves go as smoothly as possible. Our first move was made necessary because of the data center’s policies. Some of these policies (which I won’t get into here) made it difficult or impossible to get our work done. After researching other nearby data centers we moved to a new one, but within a few months it was obvious this data center wasn’t meeting our needs. Although we didn’t want to move again we didn’t really have a choice.

At the time of our first move we had 1 rack of equipment, which had both a mix of our servers and network gear and customer equipment. The services included email, web servers, terminal services, and others, and needed to be up as close to 100% as possible. By the time we moved again we had expanded to two racks, and had started allotting serious downtime from periodic network failures that the data center support personnel could not identify or clear up. As time went on the situation became intolerable and required the second move. In both moves we planned well in advance.

The key item during planning was building a comprehensive checklist. This checklist included every possible aspect of the move that I could think of, from planning our address allocations and usage, notifying customers, dealing with DNS, and quite a few others. I’ve found that in dealing with large, complex tasks (such as moving to a new data center) a growing checklist, planned out in order, helps keep you on track, makes sure you don’t miss anything, and, when you’re moving servers and readdressing at 3:00 AM and incredibly tired, keeps you from losing track of what you have and haven’t already done and helps you avoid making serious mistakes. Next time I’ll get into what we put into the checklist.

Tags: data center

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under Systems Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.