Saturday 10 December 2011

Karma and Data Centre Relocations

We're pretty much done the current project: relocation of 600 servers to a new data centre 400 kms from the old one. By accident more than by design we left the move of most of the significant Windows file shares to the last month of the relocation period.

Windows file shares are known to be a potential performance issue when you move your data centre away from a group of users who are used to having the file shares close to them. We're no exception: A few applications have been pulled back to the old data centre temporarily while we try to find a solution to the performance issues, and we have complaints from people using some desktop tools that don't work nicely with latency.

The luck part is that we've  developed lots of good karma by making the rest of the relocation go well. Now that we have issues, people are quite tolerant of the situation and are at least willing to let us try to fix the problems. I won't say they're all happy that we've slowed their work, but at least we don't have anyone screaming at us.

I'd go so far as to say this should be a rule: All other things equal, move file shares near the end of a relocation project.

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