Moving about 35 servers, something like 2000 pounds of computer hardware 50 blocks, doesn’t seem like that big of a thing. However, in our geek microcosm moving to a new colocation facility was a year long adventure with lessons learned, arguments, designs and redesigns, a hurricane, and many weekends of preparation that somehow resulted in a setup that we are all very proud of. We always want to share our experiences, so this post has some of the lessons we learned, and in the next post have all the technical detail of our new facility.

Lesson 1: Be Prophets

Sometimes you run your systems, and sometimes they run you. If you are not always looking forward, they eventually will ruin you and your job can seem like a post-apocalyptic nightmare. What your bottlenecks will be in capacity planing isn’t always obvious. Our network design was going to break down or get ugly unless we went from cabinets to a cage, and farther down the road our provider had limited power for our growth.

eye-terminator-salvation2

We did make the time to look to the future. We realized our capacity limits months before we started to feel the pressure, but because the process took a year there still was the feeling of the systems running us. They are cruel task masters – anyone that has seen Terminator or the Matrix know this. When they rule you, you end up in a reactive position and you start to lose control. The move was a reminder that this can’t be allowed to happen, we need to stay vigilant and look to the future.

Lesson 2: Beware the Purveyors of Colocation Space

They are tricksters and they want your gold. Some of them are masters of space and power and manipulate them to create the illusion of a good deal. Although a bit of an oversimplification, as a customer you generally care about a metric like “dollars per year to host a server”. However, colocation facilities generally don’t bill that way. They bill on space, power, and internet. So they do things like:

  • Offer cheaper square footage, but require more square footage per rack (Although more space can mean more room in a cage to move around in)
  • Only provide lower power options (i.e. 120/20 instead of something like 208/30) so you need more racks for the same amount of servers (Which will cause a bigger price difference over time with growth)
  • Force you to grow in increments of multiple racks so you are paying for space (And maybe even power) you don’t need as you grow
  • Put in some initial fees and initial higher prices just so they can remove or lower them to make you think you are getting a deal

If you model the costs based on your needs, accounting for growth, and look at the total cumulative costs you can see through their illusions.

Lesson 3: Holistic Design and Reality

We are control freaks. We decided to own everything inside our cage including the racks and PDUs. Short of building our own facility, this gave us a blank slate for the genesis of our perfect facility:

  • There are constraints of what is actually available to buy, and how much you can actually know what you are getting
  • Team members have different visions

Each choice you make along the way affects all the other choices. For example, Vertical PDUs mean you need a place on the rack to put them, certain types of cable management and cable arms might also take up that space. We discovered this as we went through a few different passes of various equipment that we had to return because it all didn’t work together.

Our biggest error with this was not making one person ultimately responsible for the physical design. Choices need to be made and not everyone’s ideas can be reconciled with each other and the constraints of reality. For a holistic design, eventually someone has to reconcile reality with what everyone wants or you end up with a bunch of individually well thought out pieces that don’t fit together (as well as a bit of frustration.)

Lesson 4: If it isn’t Right, Tear it Down and Do it Again

“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.”

–Ken Thompson

When something isn’t right and you decide to move forward regardless then you may have to live with it for a long time. Even worse, it can create ripples forcing you to make further bad choices in other areas and cause broken window syndrome. The discpline to take a step backwards is a quality that is easy to respect and hard to have.

drill_sergeant

When the wiring wasn’t great, even though it took a lot of time: “AGAIN!” When we purchased the wrong stuff, we returned it and started “AGAIN!” In both these instances we did this more than once. It is often a hard call to make, but it will pay in the long run if you can summon your inner drill sergeant. Eventually in order to maintain momentum you have to move forward, but a rule that can help: If you are moving forward out of laziness then it is the wrong call.

Lesson 5: Disasters Really do Happen

“Superstorm Sandy” hit the week before we were supposed to move doing significant damage to the current facility. It did manage to stay up the whole time, but only because of a bucket brigade of people carrying diesel fuel. Oddly for us it was more like “Serendipitous Sandy”:

  • Gave us time to rectify some mistakes
  • Gave us confidence in our secondary datacenter since we failed over to it before the storm
  • Gave us time during our move since we were comfortable running out of our secondary facility

Mostly it was a good taste of reality, disasters happen and you better be prepared.

Lesson 6: It is Better When the Hosting Provider Owns the Building

If your building isn’t owned by the datacenter then there are more likely to be conflicts of interest and complications. We don’t know if our new provider is going to renew their lease, so we might be moving again. Also, during Sandy there were some issues with building access since the building owner wasn’t too worried about the needs of it’s customers’ customers. Don’t overlook this factor.

Lesson 7: Pace Yourself

The actual move itself is exciting but also exhausting. We set Alex Miller on the task of finding great physical movers and he delivered with Morgen Industries. They were fast, on time, personable, and flexible. They handled de-racking, moving, and re-racking the servers. Having that part handled by movers made it so we had more energy for configuring, cabling, and fixing problems that came after that. It played a major part in ending up with a great result.

When moving in we had shifts. You can only fit so many people in the space so this seemed like the most efficient method. However, the second shift spent it’s whole shift learning what the first shift figured out. So it is better to leave yourself the time to make sure there is overlap. A move is often a chance to get things right so make sure you pace yourself in a way that will allow your team to get it right.

ThingOfBeauty

Lesson 8: Value Craftsmanship

Moving was in many ways a chance to start over and fix issues that arose from rapid organic growth over the past few years. The whole team is proud of our result. It might make us weirdoes, but when cabling looks this neat it is a sexy and sleek piece of art. I am proud of the team and we are all proud of the work we did. That has real value, even if it isn’t easily measured. In the next post I’ll get into all the detail of the beautiful result of our chaotic journey.

«
»
  • marckus

    Oh boy, that is really nice wiring. Compared to some i have seen when working for a small Company.

    • Denis

      The nicer and tighter the wiring, the more fun you will have changing it.

      • Tom Cobb

        I swear everyone who loves that type of wiring gets paid by the hour.

      • Seth Greenburg

        Actually, it is easier to maintain. Try it!

  • I love color coded wiring… once the people learn the scheme it is really helpful

  • Rafael Apocalypse

    Just keeping the systems running on a cloud datacenter like Amazon, Linode or anyother player, couldn’t be cheaper and easier to maintain? 

  • I remember it was many years ago (back in the early days of the SO Podcast) when the decision was made to run your own equipment – built and racked in a colo rather than renting servers from someone like Softlayer or Rackspace, or going into virtualised “cloud” like EC2 or Azure. 

    It’d be interesting for you to revisit that question with a blog post about costs to see how they stack up nowadays. We all know that long term prices for your own equipment work out significantly cheaper but it’s perhaps more difficult to calculate costs of power, physical space, internet, etc. 

  • Jay Bazuzi

    “the second shift spent it’s whole shift learning what the first shift figured out.”

    Read “Promiscuous Pairing and Beginners Mind”.

    Or, just have people swap out one at a time, so knowledge can easily flow between them.

  • Seun Osewa

    Tell us what happened and we’ll be happy to extract our own lessons from it!

  • Great write up @twitter-172049437:disqus and the cable management is very, very sexy.

  • Rilli

    I don’t know why, but the type on the titles on this page looks very bad. Too small spacing between letters. Very hard to read.

    • Ya, the kerning is terrible now that you point it out… The word “Lesson” really brings this out

  • Martin Barry

    Is that 5 1u servers at the bottom with very full cable management arms? Whatever they are, they sure don’t look like they’ll have good air flow.

    • Ambient board temp on those 1U web servers is around 70F (However we have pretty low CPU on them 15-30% average when they are all up).

      So it doesn’t seem like it is an actual problem at this point. There is a fair amount of space between the back of the servers and the arms, so I think it is enough for the flow.

      I don’t see our CPU going up dramatically any time soon for prolonged periods, and servers can generally run pretty hot and be fine. So I don’t think stress testing for temperature is worth the time and effort at the moment. 

  • KrisWebDev

    Why don’t you burst and have a DRP in the cloud like Amazon AWS? Or just put the whole infrastructure in the cloud. The cloud was invented to stop worring about scalability, standardization and disaster recovery issues, so about most of the lessons leanrnt from previous pains. Maybe it’s not cost effective? Maybe the cloud is just a hype? I’d really like to know the reason for a large Internet-centric company to own its infrastructure.

  • Awesome! Thanks for this blog article, Kyle! Tips are always great to reads, especially me! I found it interesting when you said if your building isn’t owned by the datacenter then there are more likely to be conflicts of interest and complications. I will make sure to keep this in mind. Thanks again! https://www.colocationauthority.com/