Adventures in (small) datacenter migration

  • Authors:

  • Jon Kuroda;Jeff Anderson-Lee;Albert Goto;Scott McNally

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, EECS;University of California, Berkeley, EECS;University of California, Berkeley, EECS;University of California, Berkeley, EECS

  • Venue:
  • LISA'11 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Large Installation System Administration
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In May 2011, we embarked on an ambitious course - in 3 weeks: clear out a small, soon to be demolished, research datacenter containing 5 dozen research systems spanning 5 research groups and, along with a new faculty member's systems located off-site, move it all into another space suffering from 18 years of accumulated computer systems research history. We made it happen, but only after intensive pre-planning and after overcoming a number of challenges, both technical and non-technical, and suffering a moderate amount of bodily injury. We present an account of our adventures and examine our work in facilities, networking, and project management and the challenges we encountered along the way, many of which were not primarily technical in nature, and evaluate our approaches, methods, and results to extract useful lessons so that others may learn from our reckless ambition.