Datacenter Move, Episode I, The Phantom Menace

Okay, folks, this is it. A little over two weeks ago, we moved a bunch of people into the spiffy new building. And this Friday, we begin the process of moving our computers over from the BMR to the Core (which is now what we’re calling the SSF).Are we nervous?Yes. Yes, we are. How could we not be? You know the old curse; May you live in interesting times. Well, this is a pretty interesting time.But we’re also confident. All of our plans, our timelines, our probable outcomes are unraveling, intertwining, recombining, and falling generally into place. By Saturday evening, we should have a pretty solid idea of exactly how well we did on the whole ordeal, and how the second and larger part of the move will go.As a reminder, the sysadmin of the particular system will send out a more detailed notice, but here’s the big picture of what’s moving:

• Remaining TeraGrid infrastructure
• NMPDR and IGSB infrastructure
• The Cosmea compute cluster
• LCRC PVFS fileservers

We’ll also be moving the bulk of our storage and parts. But that’s just our pain, not yours.In each of the above cases, the resource in question will go down on the Friday before the move (at some point in the day, depending on the resource), and get prepped for move. First thing Saturday morning, the movers will move the equipment into the Core, at which point we’ll start hooking things back up and have things operational as soon as possible.This is going to be an experience!