IT migration under budget pressure
IT migration 😱 Tight budget 🔨 Diverse and often old platforms.
Over the course of more than a year now I have been helping a customer with analyzing various IT related processes in the company, agreeing on a strategy for IT and some related development and finally helping with and coordinating the implementation. The customer has an established business with 3 decades tradition. There is a lot of data processing on computers not seen in the attached pictures and there is some infrastructure to support the operations of the company, with things like data, file, backup, web, testing and development servers. Overall the customer has about 70 physical systems in the modest server room with very thick brick and stone walls located in the middle of the dry basement of the building.
Quickly it became clear that besides some optimizations on the process, and further software and database level, there is also a great need for current, redundant servers and network.
During the summer, the customer was able to lay additional cables to a corner room and get rid of an old actively cooled switch in an office used as a tiny call center. Moving all managed network gear with active cooling into the server room allows the customer's employees to work in a quieter environment, improves IT security and allows bigger consolidation.
Followed a big network migration. The original mix of various managed and unmanaged switches was replaced by a double-star topology. Two FiberStore S5850-24S2Q switches together serve as a single core thanks to Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation that is used to connect the 5 FiberStore S5800-48T4S access switches to both of them using 10 Gb uplinks. The core switches are connected together using 2x40 Gb links. There is still enough room for expansion. Both switch series have the same CLI and GUI and are more than sufficient for the customer's needs.
During this migration, we also added 4 second hand Dell servers that had very good price/ performance ratio. All of them run #Proxmox 8 and use #OpenZFS for storage (The hardware RAID controller was reflashed to IT mode using this guide https://fohdeesha.com/docs/H710-B0.html). Two of them serve as an ancillary virtualization cluster and run a virtual firewall and a few testing systems. The other two serve as computing resources for the data processing workloads.
The second migration wave started last week when two new ASUS RS520A-E11-RS24U with AMD EPYC Milan 7443P (24 cores), 1 TB RAM, 122 TB raw NVMe storage capacity and 4x10 Gb NICs arrived. They also run Proxmox and OpenZFS. The customer is now migrating, consolidating and upgrading to these from a mix of VMware and physical platforms with old software versions.
The journey is not complete, however some of the benefits are clear even now. The heat from the computers gets reused now to help heating the building, which is definitelly perceptible. From testing, it is clear the new servers will speed up complex SQL queries by a lot.
