Common Blunders During a Data Center Move
You’ve decided on relocating some or part of your Data Center IT equipment. You feel confident that you have a handle on things… After all, you and your team rack and stack servers, storage and network devices all the time. How hard could doing a Data Center Relocation be? There is something that is bothering you, though. You can’t pin it down, but you feel you’re missing something. As the first move event approaches, the feeling grows, and you lose sleep. You repeatedly ask yourself, what am I missing???
We see people make common blunders as they prepare for a Data Center Relocation while focusing on their primary work tasks. Understanding there a few areas where mistakes can bite, will surely help you sleep better.
The most common areas for mistakes are seen in the area of racking and stacking. Your team feels they can do this with their eyes closed, so they don’t need help. There is a big difference between racking, stacking and cabling one or two new servers and moving your entire IT infrastructure to a new data center. Inefficiencies that don’t matter when working on a few devices can result in a prolonged outage, when multiplied across all the devices in your environment. Many people will un-rack servers and stack them in piles. Then, go back and pull the rails, placing them all in one bin. When they go to rerack the devices, they spend hours hunting for the matched set of rails that go with the current device. Or, they fail to identify associated peripherals/USB devices (i.e., a USB software license key).
Pre-labeling every device, rail and peripheral will help your Data Center Relocation run efficiently. Taping those rails together and labeling them with the device name and new rack location means no more hunting for rails. Labeling peripherals means you don’t hear, “hey does anybody know where this USB drive goes?”
Understanding the impact your rack layout has on your move is also critical. Does the new rack layout mean that your storage is now six feet further away from the servers than it was previously? Does that mean you need longer cables? Is your storage closer now? Will cables that are now too long make the racks’ back unmanageable?
Changing IP addresses as part of your move is a fact of life for many data center moves. It also opens you up to risk. Your application teams tell you there aren’t any hardcoded IP addresses in their application. You think “great,” but what about your firewalls, load balancers or database listeners? These hidden IP dependencies are likely to impact your ability to make applications available after your move. Do you change IP addresses before shutdown or wait until you’re trying to bring the device up within your new IP range? This needs to be addressed before the first server is shut down.
The early decisions you make have to be solid ones! It’s good to have experience by your side as you start down this path, so be sure you partner with data center move experts who know the common issues and can help you avoid them. If you’d like to have a conversation with our experts, reach us through our Contact page at our website: https://www.cumulussg.com/contact-us
Blog Author
John Doherty, Co Founder & Managing Partner
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