0

This is just a hypothetical question to satisfy my own curiosity.

Our company is based out of Site A, this is getting a bit full and we are having to setup pilot offices for teams, branching the teams onto many smaller sites. An ideal solution would be to move the entire company to a new office that is big enough to house all our staff with room for expansion (Site C).

We have our own server farm at Site A which we then have replicated at Site B (which is fine where it is).

How does someone move Site A to say Site C? We have no real room to have down time - there are a lot of customers on our servers.

DaveShaw
  • 118
  • 3
  • What's your idea of "no downtime"? Something I've found from experience it that it can really vary between organizations. Is 15 seconds unforeseeable, or can 8 hours over night go unnoticed? – Coops Jul 06 '11 at 10:53
  • I think 8 hours on a night is about all we are allowed. I can see it taking more than that to re-locate the hardware. – DaveShaw Jul 06 '11 at 11:01

1 Answers1

6

If your site A is really fully replicated at site B, the only way to do it without or only minimal downtime would be to move production to site B, then move site A to C, test it etc. and after that, move production back to the primary site, now located at C.

How this is done in practice is of course totally dependent on your systems at A and B. It will likely requires a large amount of planning, testing, improvisation and, in the end, finger crossing.

Sven
  • 98,649
  • 14
  • 180
  • 226
  • 1
    That's the only option I could think of... just hope "B" doesn't go down during the move... moving all that hardware could take a while. – DaveShaw Jul 06 '11 at 10:52
  • 1
    +1 "requires a large amount of planning, testing, improvisation" if you *really* have no room for downtime, your only solutions is a lot of hard work and testing! – Coops Jul 06 '11 at 10:54
  • 2
    @DaveShaw: You really cant provide 100% redundancy during a datacenter move unless you have 3 sites and are building up a 4th. I know, Moore's law.. but still, no need to get paranoid. – pauska Jul 06 '11 at 10:58
  • You could do the move from A to C in stages, so some of the servers in B are replicated to A and some to C, until gradually they're all in C. – Paul Tomblin Jul 06 '11 at 12:28
  • @Paul Tomblin - I like that option, not thought of that :) – DaveShaw Jul 06 '11 at 14:22