How to move the data center

http://virtualize.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/moving-a-virtualized-data-center/

Two weekends ago we have moved our data center to a new location about 60 kilometers away. While we have experience with moving a data center (we moved it to it’s previous location only two years ago) this was the first time we had to move 150 servers contained in only 30 physical servers.

Of the 150 servers about 120 reside on only six physical servers (DL585 G2) that are our VI cluster hosts. We also have two DL585 G1’s that hold about 50 Virtual Desktops, a DL585 G2 that holds a dedicated SAP testing environment. So there was quite a risk involved that servers would not survive the transport phase and we would be left with too few cluster hosts to run all the servers.

Check this article out it’s very interesting. One of the clients I’m dealing with is talking about a data center move, migrating the servers from their legacy data centers to their new purpose built co-located facility. The issue with this is the cost of moving a server, I can move any server from data center to data center, but looking at the big picture, should we not be either virtualizing and moving? Or moving from server1 to servern1, my new server in my new data center, the point being that moving a DL360G1, or a DL760G1 is a waste of energy expanded in the move, and from an efficiency standpoint, I’d suggest a DL585/DL580G4 could probably provide a similar performance level at less space or power, at the very least, it should be cheaper to support from a hardware level.

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