Tag: learnfrommymistakes
Building a Better Data Center Move
by Josh Williams on Feb.22, 2010, under Project Management
Or, Four Things I Learned As A Project Manager.
A little over a week ago, I headed a project that was small in scale but large in importance: we picked up a sizeable chunk of hardware from one colocation facility and moved it across town to another. Small in scale, as it was only a dozen or so pieces of equipment; large in importance, as it involved high end switches, a SAN, a VMware cluster, and a couple dedicated web servers. We host entire networks, so with multiple businesses riding on this being careful was priority one.
The underlying concept of the move was a phased pipelined approach, where in as any Equipment Group X is being pulled from the rack, Group Y is in transit, and Group Z is being installed. In other words about the time something was done installing the next set of gear would be arriving.
It actually worked fairly well; I think it ultimately was the correct approach. But there were a couple bumps in the road, which, as PM, I could have planned around. These are the lessons I learned…
