November 7, 2006

Data Center Cleanup

Over the last couple of years I have been working on cleaning up the server racks in our data center. There are several smaller projects involved with the whole procedure. One of the most effective projects is our migration to HP blade servers. Another project is consolidating our servers into new racks and attempting to keep cabling clean. We are also moving everything possible into our VMware environment which has a side effect of reducing the total number of physical servers.

The data center became a mess to begin with because a few years back there was not a central server team that managed the server equipment. Rather than one team being responsible for all servers each project group purchased, staged, and managed their own servers. As you can imagine this lack of overall responsibility lead to servers being put haphazardly into racks with no regard for cable management as well as poor space utilization.

About three years ago all servers were consolidated under a single group and they were a mess. There was no patch management on them. The data center was full due to the poor planning and management of physical space by the miscellaneous groups that placed their servers there.

This post will be the beginning of a series on the process I am going through to clean up the data center where I work. I plan to include everything I run into related to this cleanup and consolidation effort. There is enough information to provide several articles on the whole procedure, so check back occasionally for “cleanup” articles.

November 07th 2006 Posted to Cleanup, Data Center

Comments(0)