[arin-discuss] Moving Data Centers - new thread

[Rick Ewart]

Hi All.

 

I wanted to follow-up on the "portability" thread for a comment made in
the process about data center moves.. I started a new thread since its
really a different discussion.

 

I have a /24 that we own and is currently advertised via BGP on our data
center's internet as well as on a dedicated circuit from another provider.
I am planning for a move in the future - like a year from now. Last time I
moved data centers 10 years ago I put up a firewall and switch at the new
location and then moved all the servers 1 by 1 or few by few. Its was
close by so it wasn't a big deal. But virtualization has certainly changed
the options available, and I expect to move about 30 minutes away from my
current location. Also a lot has changed in terms of my customer's
expectations of uptime.

 

I have been casually thinking about the move and wondering how I might be
able to do something a bit more "slick" to move it with minimal downtime.
I don't purport to be a BGP expert so pardon me if I say something stupid
but.. I was thinking that since I will put my own circuits into the new
place (one with the "other provider" I have today), I could probably just
use BGP to move things. The thought was to replicate at least the most
critical/public facing servers to the new location and then just
stop/start the BGP advertising to change to the new location. It seems to
me that this should be nice and easy at least with the 1 "other provider"
I have today, and avoid the need to re-IP anything. I mean, the
convergence should be like normal and quick. Correct?

 

If so, it seems I can have almost zero downtime on the more static things
like web sites. Then I can move the SANs, main virtual hosts and such a
bit more "leisurely". Obviously things like mail servers and such will be
more of an issue because they are constantly changing (but are less
visible to the outside world if they go down for an hour), but DNS
servers, many web servers, etc should be ok I would think.

 

I welcome any thoughts on this. Want to make sure I am not overlooking
something basic.

 

Thanks,

Rick

 

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