MyNewPlace Collocation

August 4th, 2009 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in About Us, Technology | No Comments »

Last week, MyNewPlace performed what CTO and VP of Engineering Ken Cluff described as ‘open heart surgery’ on our site, which involved the delicate task of moving all of our servers to one collocation at our datacenter, 365 Main.

Moving servers around is not exactly a risk-averse production; when a company is required to unplug the device that is the entire business, there is a certain amount of expected anxiety. Thus, the move was undertaken with the utmost care, spread over a few weeks time and under the close watch of Hitachi, a server manufacturer who sent some of their specialist to supervise.

When I asked our IT department why the move was necessary, I received a short answer and a long answer. The short answer was “power.” The long answer was that it was necessary to consolidate our 2 existing server farm cages on two different floors of the 365 Main facility into one larger cage, all connected by a new cutting edge Juniper ‘virtual chassis’ switch. Up until last week, we kept our server racks in two collocation areas at the 365 Main data center and have now moved our servers into one bigger collocation area.

So let’s put this in terms that we can understand, by using an apartment allegory. Let’s call a collocation area an apartment, a datacenter (365 Main) an apartment building, a rack a bedroom and a server a person:

A long time ago, MyNewPlace rented two apartments on different floors in apartment building. Each apartment had 3 bedrooms and three residents. Then, each of the six apartment residents went out, got married and had children, but no one moved out! Pretty soon, there was simply not enough room for all the apartment residents to be comfortable. Also, the apartment building began to ask questions as to exactly how many people were living in these apartments, since it was apparent that the electrical needs of both apartments had been rising steadily for a while. So finally, MyNewPlace talked to the landlord and said that they would like to end both 3 bedroom apartment leases and move into a brand new penthouse apartment, with enough room for everyone, as well as room for future generations of apartment residents.

Now that we have moved all of our servers to one big penthouse suite of a collocation area, our servers have access to all the power that they could ever need. Now that our site is housed comfortably, we can easily monitor all of our servers and add new ones as necessary.