We are working on remodeling our datacenter. We have purchased several companies in the last year, and each time we do, we bring their servers into our datacenter, to centralize and reduce costs. Our problem now is, we cannot replace all these old servers at once, as they all hold different financial programs written by the companies we purchased. This means we have projects in place that will convert all these systems to our financial program. That process is scheduled to take 2 years. In the mean time we have all these older servers that we have to accommodate. How do you go about accommodating old servers in a new datacenter while keeping in mind these servers will be gone in a couple of years.
You have brought up the question which most of us face in our career as administrator or project manager. There are many approaches to handle this condition depending on company road map and policies. As an administrator or project manager you prime focus is consolidation, migration and keeping operational cost low as possible. I will try to recommend you following approach to handle :
Plan to have a Virtual environment (VM Ware or any other technology). Now days most of applications support the be migrated to Virtual environment.
Mount all to be "decommissioned" server in separate rack.
Make your detailed plan for migration and migrated accordingly.
Later stage you can remove the rack also (that will save your cost, if you are in colo or paid datacenter).
Thank you for your suggestions thecommis. I was wondering about moving all the old servers which we plan to replace to a separate rack. Some of them are so old they don't really fit into modern racks, so we may have to fudge them around a bit. I guess there are very few of us out there who get the joy of creating a brand new data center with all new equipment.
I agree with you, but definitely you can work on consolidation and migration. At some stage you definitely need to retire old servers and move to new server. That time will be best to virtualize them.
for the servers which are doesn't fit into rack: if they are smaller than rack then use rack-tray and place server on the tray. and for server which are larger than size than i don't think you have too many options
Old Servers Have to be Accommodated
