HEAnet's relocation: Moving the Network and Services Brian Nisbet Network Operations Team BN227-RIPE

Moving, Step-by-Step Planning Informing Moving –Services –Schools –Office –Network Cleaning-Up

Planning Move announced in early 2006, to be completed by July Five month timeframe to move all equipment and personnel out of Brooklawn House. Company-wide activity. Aim to minimise cost and disruption to all users of the network and services.

External Dependencies Two Landlords. Two groups of Building Contractors. One firm of Furniture Movers. Two providers of Co-lo services. Four Telecommunications Companies. A large number of very patient Clients.

Spreading the Word Clients had priority… …but detailed information was slow to come. Important dates were difficult to pin down from a long way off. Some important events were at short notice due to availability of people/equipment. Continued attempts to give as much warning and flexibility as possible.

Services Move HEAnet services supported by: –> 70 servers –6 switches –2 routers Client co-location equipment requirements amount to 10 racks Moved from Brooklawn House, Ballsbridge to ServeCentric, Blanchardstown Move commenced planning in January 2006 Tendering & ordering commenced in February 2006, completed in May Move of equipment commenced mid May 2006, ended July Project commenced and completed on schedule, within budget!

Schools Services Move Schools services moving from Brooklawn House to Servcentric. Ten servers and some networking equipment. And the solution – more than forty pieces of equipment and over one kilometre of cat5! No actual interruption to IP connectivity to individual schools.

Exodus 1 st Floor, 5 George’s Dock, IFSC, Dublin 1. New office was built from scratch, completely different requirements to old tenants. Fewer offices, much bigger comms room. Slow dismantling of Brooklawn House, prior to a one weekend move of furniture, fixtures and people.

Exodus Left work in Ballsbridge on Friday 21 st July, went to work in the IFSC on Monday 24 th July. Office fully recabled and connected to the outside world (phone & data) by Sunday evening. Full onsite NOC operations resumed by 09:00 on Monday morning. Everything fully back to normal by Tuesday.

Client/Network Moves (1) Aim to remove the Brooklawn House (BH) PoP from the network and move all clients to other PoPs with minimal downtime. Not everything was possible within the timeline. All clients moved by 8 th September, some remaining work to do due to provider capacity issues. Expected to be resolved by the end of Longest outage – 48 hours. Shortest outage – 1 minute.

Client/Network Moves (2) Stage 1: Create full access PoP in Citywest. Stage 2: Set-up temporary HEA PoP. Stage 3: Migrate BH clients to either Citywest or DCU on a per Telco/per technology basis. Stage 4: Client moves out of temporary HEA PoP and final moves/reconnects of any remaining circuits.

Stage 1 – Access PoP for Citywest Temporary equipment taken from testlab and put back into production. Freed-up production equipment moved to Citywest. Circuit migration started from BH -> CWT.

Step 2 – Temporary HEA PoP Layer2 PoP only. Space allocated by the HEA. Two sets of fibre cuts and rack moves. One evening’s work in both cases. Unexpected fibre runs, both into and within BH. PoP connected to the backbone via Bluenet circuit. Not a viable long-term solution, planned to be in use until late 2006.

Stage 3 – Client Migration Citywest PoP Technologies – SDH & Ethernet Clients – DIAS, DIT, EPA, HEA, HETAC, HRB, ICHEC, IUA, ITB, ITnet, NCAD, NCI, NUIM, RCSI, TippInst, UCD. DCU PoP Technologies – Serial Clients – CDVEC Crumlin, CDVEC Killester, CDVEC Liberties CDVEC Whitehall, NQAI, NUI, RIA. Largest single move was six clients.

Stage 4 – Final Steps Current clients using the HEA PoP should be migrated out by end of Notification that capacity issues have been solved and lead time of twenty days. Chasing final circuit reconnects with Telcos. Final audits of all network monitoring and documentation.

Questions? (Comments, Queries…)