Transcript Charity Finance Directors’ Group

How to Move a Datacentre
Brychan Watkins
Head of IS, Action for Children
Ben Grinsted
Senior Infrastructure & Security Analyst
History
What were the issues?
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Data Centre in a converted kitchen
In 3.5 years:
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5 Power cuts
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2 Major Communications failures
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1 Burst water main
Site power consumption within 5 amps of the
max (of 200 amps per phase).
Disaster Recovery time estimated at 4 months
Part of a Programme
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Increase flexibility of access
Network Improvement
Reduce Environmental Impact
Data consolidation & data security
Improve Systems Availability
Introduce effective service continuity
Unification of Communications
Improve IS Security
What did it take?
3 years of precursor projects
6 months of planning
4 months of prep work
4 days - Thursday 5pm to Tuesday 9am
Several 100 hrs of overtime
6 hrs contingency - all used.
1 completely new networking technology
(Xsigo)
6 'specialist' IT removers
2 lorries
1 Toyota to crash into the back of the above
What did it take?
IS staff working 400+ hrs over the weekend.
Testers across the UK
1 rogue router plugged in where it shouldn't have been
30 pizzas (approximately)
1 lonely Mimesweeper box to hold all the email
1 trip the wrong way down a dual carriage way in
Docklands.
1 Fanatical project manager
2K Capital underspend (who counted the VAT twice?)
The Precursors
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Virtualise our servers - VMware.
Storage Area Network – dual Netapp
Disk based backup – Evault
Network upgrade – 100Mb/sec MPLS
Where did we move to?
Packing up
Transporting
And installed
The new datacentre
What have we achieved?
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Greatly improved service stability
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Better than 99.93%
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Zero power or cooling failures
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Separated Test/train and live systems
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No one fiddling with the equipment
New ways of working
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Lights out remote management
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Emphasis on good change control
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Capacity management
What have we achieved?
Effective Disaster recovery capability
• Now estimated at 2 days for critical
systems.
Highly flexible computing provision
• Xsigo ‘virtualised’ core network.
• Have now created own internal cloud
• Going for 90% virtualised.
Effect on the Business
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Minimal
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‘Thin cliented’ a few older applications
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Most users did not notice.
Because
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Most computer use not at HQ
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Most applications Web or Thin Client
Delivery.
Key enabler for our move to Watford
And then we did it again
Watford Fallback
Datacentre
Questions?