We’ve successfully moved! Over the October long weekend, Digital Platforms and Operations (DPO) relocated the University’s IT equipment from its primary data centre (Kermit) to its new home at YourDC at Edinburgh Parks. 11 racks containing over 100 pieces of equipment, some the size of a family pizza box, others requiring a pallet lifter to move around and all moved, very gently 😊. Commencing at 5pm, Thursday the 3rd and operational on Sunday evening, the 6th. Early starts and late evenings to get the job done. A massive team effort by all.
The logistics that go into moving a data centre is one hell of an undertaking. Planning started many months prior to the actual physical move. Design work undertaken, re-configuration of networks, workloads and certain hardware relocated to the Hawthorn data centre, redundant links installed for all inter-site communication (internet, voice (phones), remote sites and between data centres), suppliers on standby, transit insurance, specialised removalists (2 trucks), cable and power management and of course our very well versed team of professionals within DPO who made it all happen. Congratulations to the team, well done and thank you. A good data centre move is one where no-one really knows it happened!
Click here for some photos of the team in action over the long weekend.
Both the University’s data centres (primary and secondary) are now located away from the campus, physically separated for redundancy. There is a lot of capital outlay and ongoing maintenance required to operate your own data centres, and this responsibility has now been transferred to a third party (YourDC) who specialises in data centre management. The University will only pay for the amount of rack space/power it consumes on an ongoing monthly basis. This allows the University to be agile in its consumption of computing hardware resources.
This article was posted on behalf of Shane Turner, Manager Unified Communications.