Metagyre was engaged to develop the return on investment analysis for consolidating Client’s seven data centers and then move their main data center from one Seattle, WA. location which they had out grown to a new Seattle location. The project consisted of selecting and building out a new 6,000 sf data center followed by moving their equipment and applications into the new facilities. Their computational environment included 1,000+ virtual and physical servers, 1.5 petabytes of EMC storage, mainframe, tape backup and Cisco network. Client’s main data center supports their entire on-line e-commerce mission critical applications and approximately 200 different systems. Client’s business required that the equipment, applications and data move without disrupting their 24×7 ability to accept and fulfill revenue generation.

Client uses a number of technologies to deliver world class on-line services to their customers. These included: EMC Storage, Cisco, Checkpoint, F5, IBM Mainframe, IBM Storage, IBM Blade Centers, IBM xSeries, HP servers, HP Storage, Sun Solaris, VMware, Linux, Microsoft Windows 200X, MS SQL, Oracle, and Microsoft Exchange.

Design and Build Out
Metagyre partnered with Client’s senior management to structure the project and budget required to complete the data center design, procurement and build out. The major components we developed in this stage included:

• Technical site reviews and contract redline activities side by side with Client’s senior management.
• Design and build out the new data center facility including structured cabling, electrical and floor layouts.
• Design,procure and integrate network connectivity for the new data center and build a dark fiber backbone back to their existing main data center.
• Source and develop criteria for selecting sub-contractors as well as working with sub-contractors to design and implement power, fire suppression, cooling, lighting and structured cabling.
• Extend the network across the two data center sites.
• Designate rack layouts, server placement, port assignments and in-rack cable standards.
• Lead workshops with client staff and EMC to establish SAN and storage requirements, procurement contracts and implementation.
• Secure stakeholder agreement of plans, designs and procurements.
• Schedule and manage all professional services and sub-contracts for activities requiring third party activities or equipment purchases.
• Test core data center infrastructure, redundant power and networking.
• Stage, test and verify seed servers and storage.

System Migration
Metagyre worked with Client’s system engineers to develop the detailed plans to formalize application and data move tasks. These detailed plans called short interval schedules included test, go/no go and roll back procedures for each component of the application. We engaged the stakeholders to gain plan approvals and schedule around business needs. Metagyre engineered and implemented several unique migration strategies based on complex system and data business requirements.

Client’s virtual machines were migrated using VMware’s VMotion over the dark fiber backbone and reintroduced into production running on an ESX cluster in the new data center. In the case of redundant physical clusters, the cluster was split, one of the servers brought up in the new data center to re-establish the cluster and then the cluster was failed over to the server in the new data center.

By advancing the purchases of other project’s planned equipment refreshes, the seed equipment was acquired with minimal additional cost. The seed equipment was staged as necessary in the new data center prior to system migration. Following the migration of a system, the equipment in the old data center was moved to the new data center to serve as the seed equipment for the next system.

Obstacles
Client’s systems are tied closely to high profile events such as the Grammys, World Cup, and breaking news. Metagyre’s responsibility was to develop a flexible migration schedule that could respond quickly to Client’s business needs. When changes in world events dictated a scheduled migration had to be placed on hold, we were able to substitute and fill the schedule with another system migration container. Metagyre’s migration process allowed Client to retain the flexibility needed to meet changing business requirements while meeting the scheduled end date.

Project Summary
The main Client data center was successfully relocated within the allotted time frame and budget while maintaining the business continuity needs of their enterprise. Following the move, older equipment whose services were migrated to new seed gear was repurposed in support of their development and test environments or to expand disaster recovery capacity.

With this data center move and system migration, Client was able to significantly lower their monthly costs by consolidating the number of sites managed and increase the capabilities they provided to their internal business customers through its improved design features.

Is a Boeing 747 three times “faster” than a Boeing 737?  They both cruise at around 500 miles per hour. The difference is that the 747 carries 500 passengers where as the 737 only carries 150. The Boeing 747 is three times bigger (more bandwidth) than the Boeing 737, not faster.  And like an airplane, as long as you have fewer files (passengers) than the network can carry at any one time, increasing the bandwidth will not reduce presentation times.

From a physical perspective, in order to increase the speed at which web pages or other data are presented to customers on the Internet you need to reduce the distance.  There are two strategies to reduce distance.  Regional data center (RDC) or content delivery network  (CDN) strategies both reduce the distance data travels to customers.

In this discussion we will look at the effects of an regional data center design architecture for reducing the time it takes data to reach customers. With an RDC strategy, you have multiple data centers (or collocation facilities) strategically placed around the globe to service those areas closest to the RDC.  For this analysis we simulated an RDC in Seattle, London and Hong Kong.

In order to expose the base Internet latency a test was run sending one packet of data over the Internet and measuring its round trip time.  This is referred to as a ping test.  As you can see the following chart shows latency increasing over distance from Seattle.

By moving the data and servers closer to the customer and establishing a regional presence, delivery times experienced by the total customer base becomes more consistent regardless of their location.  In order to simulate an regional data center presence the ping test was repeated with Asia Pacific locations measuring latency times to Hong Kong and European locations measuring latency to London.  The chart below shows the results of that regional data center simulated ping test.  The distances and the latency are from the initiating location to the simulated regional data center.  There was a 65% improvement in the average response time utilizing the regional data center model.

Conclusion:
While big network pipes will push more data out the data center door, it will not always deliver it to Internet customers faster.  In order to reduce latency, move your data and presentation services closer to your customers.  Depending on application solutions or systems, significant reduction in latency can be achieved through the strategic use of regional data centers.

The tests run for this analysis accurately assess latency with for simple data requests.  This investigation does not represent a specific customer experience and results will vary depending on variables such as time of day, network provider and other public network activity.