Shifting data centres successfully

• Tags:
• Insurance,
• Inventory,
• KVM,
• Backup

Brien M Posey

Published: 17 Aug 2007 11:50 BST

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…you might also ask them if they would like to verify your list or if you need to provide photographs of each machine. This probably sounds a little odd, but my insurance agent required photographs of my hardware prior to insuring my network.

Once you have met with your insurance agent, it's a good idea to meet with your hardware vendor. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that your hardware vendor will be able to get you through any moving-related catastrophes.

Depending on your relationship with your hardware vendor, you might be able to negotiate a deal in which your hardware vendor is on call on moving day and the day after. There are a couple of reasons why it's important to negotiate a deal like this.

Firstly, servers just do not like to be moved. I have been through several data-centre moves and I have never had one go completely smoothly. It always seems as though I have to replace a couple of hard drives — or maybe a power supply or two — after a move.

Secondly, it's important to have your hardware vendor available to you because your ultimate goal is to minimise the impact of the move on your business. As such, moves often happen on the weekends; typically late at night. Under normal circumstances, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a computer store open at 4am on a Sunday. You really don't want to have to wait until Monday morning to be able to replace any damaged components, so your hardware vendor needs to be on call to ensure that any necessary components can be purchased immediately.

Once you have got your hardware vendor to agree to be available to you during the move, you need to address the issue of potential serious catastrophes. For example, you need to know how long it would take your hardware vendor to get you replacement machines if all of your servers were destroyed during the move. Since it would probably take your insurance agent a few days to get you a settlement cheque, you should find out if there is any way that replacement machines could be ordered (and possibly even delivered to you) before the insurance cheque arrives. Your hardware vendor might be reluctant to agree to such an arrangement, but they might change their mind if you remind them of the amount of money you spend with them each year and how much they would profit if you replace all of your servers.

Backup everything
Another critical task related to moving is that of performing a full, system state backup of each machine prior to shutting it down. Remember that your servers will be in a precarious position during the move, so these backups are basically your lifeline. You must therefore take the backups very seriously.

At the very least, you will want to verify the backups; but, ideally, you should try restoring them to another machine to make sure that there are no problems. After a backup is made, it should be stored in a cool, dry and secure place until after the move.

You have probably heard the old saying: "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket." Well, this saying applies to this situation. On moving day, don't put your backups on the same truck as your servers. Otherwise, the backup tapes could be destroyed right along with the servers if the truck is involved in a serious accident. Instead, transport the tapes separately.

When moving the backup tapes, be especially aware of the temperature in the vehicle that is being used to transport the tapes. If you are moving in the winter, you will want to ensure that the vehicle's heater has warmed up before you start loading the tapes: cold weather can wreak havoc on backup tapes. Likewise, if you are moving in the summer, don't leave the tapes in a hot car.

Prioritise which systems should be brought back online first
One of the most important things you should do is prioritise the order in which the servers should be brought back online once they arrive in the new location. In any organisation, some servers are more important than others. Your goal should, therefore, be to bring the highest-priority servers online first, so as to minimise the downtime of mission-critical applications. If you don't have a backup data centre, you might even be able to orchestrate a plan in which the highest-priority servers are brought online in the new facility before the lower-priority servers are even moved.

Prioritising your servers helps minimise the downtime for your mission-critical applications, but it also helps you to spot any critical problems quickly. Imagine, for example, that you decided to move everything at once and then bring all of the servers online once everything had been moved and hooked up. If one of your most critical servers got damaged during the move, you would end up being down for longer than you intended. If you had focused on moving and bringing up the most critical servers first, you would have found out about the problem more quickly and could have start working on it right away.

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