What could possibly be more fun than standing outside in the 100+ degree heat here in southeastern PA? Standing outside in 90+ degree heat while waiting in line at Disney World. At least there’s the promise of something fun, and possibly something cool and wet at the end of the wait.
While recently wading through the sea of humanity and waiting in some of the infernal lines that define Disney at this time of year, I was struck by an interesting IT analogy early in the week (yes, I really did need a vacation, and by the end of the week I wasn’t thinking about IT at all).
In last June and early July, the number of baby-strollers per square foot in the Magic Kingdom increases to approximately 10x the normal rate. This forces one to put up with gives one many opportunities to observe other people’s children under extreme conditions. It’s amazing to watch parents expect their 5-year olds to behave like perfect angels in subtropical queue lines for upwards of 45 minutes, or sprint from one end of a park to another on tiny, tired little legs to score a Toy Story Fast-Pass before they’re all gone. It’s amazing because you can tell these kids are perfect hellions under ideal conditions as well. Putting them under stress only intensifies the problems that already exist.
Likewise, if you’ve got poorly designed or neglected infrastructure, simply moving it to a colo facility isn’t going to improve up-time or performance significantly, if at all. Certainly you can improve environmentals, save capex, and get lower network latency with a colo move, but if application response time and reliability are sucking wind before the move because of bad design or sysadmin neglect, not much is going to change.
My point isn’t that you should avoid putting your infrastructure in a better home if you need to, but that you shouldn’t expect it to behave any differently just because you moved it. Moreover, move time is not the time to make drastic changes to your production systems. It’s not a “free” outage window. The more changes you make during a move, the higher the risk of a failed, or at minimum a very stressful move.
On the other hand, a move can be an ideal time to upgrade to better hardware and legitimately raise your expectations. For example, you can set up new hardware next to your old, cluster it, and then move the new half of the cluster to a better home while the old half continues to run the business. After you complete the move and let the clusters resynchronize, you can turn down the old cluster and all activity will automatically switch over to the new hardware. Your users will never feel a thing. Very little pain, but very much gain.
Of course that all sounds good, and there are a lot of details involved in making it happen, but that’s what we do best. If you’re interested in smoothly moving your critical IT gear to a new home and need some experienced help to get it done, give us call. Hardware prone to temper tantrums is one of our specialties.
//spk
