"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). 
Computer Networks.
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Over the last weekend we moved into our new office. The move also included 13 servers, the last remains of our former server room.

Most servers from our old server room, including several VMware clusters with their NetApp and DELL SANs, had already been moved to a colocation facility in July. At the IP-Exchange data center we now have two full-height 19" racks of computers working for us—connected via a gigabit fiber optic line to our new office.

Only systems that we need locally were moved into the new  office (e.g. one of our three domain controllers, the Cisco VoIP system,  and our NAS used for workstation backups, among others).

The photos were taken during this server move. We transported 13 servers over 300 meters to the new office. The (careful!) ride took about 10 minutes. All servers together store about 5 Terabyte of data.

This calculation results in a bandwidth of 67 Gigabit per second. ;-)

 

Moved Amount of Data

Terabyte

5

Gigabyte

5,000

Megabyte

5,000,000

Megabit

40,000,000

 

Time for the Move

Minutes

10

Seconds

600

 

Achieved Bandwidth

Mbit/s

66,667

Gbit/s

67

Our Local Systems that were Not Moved to the Colocation Facility Moving a server creates an incredible bandwidth
The Careful Ride Took about 10 Minutes Moving 5 terabytes over 300 meters
The new home for the servers The new home for just a few servers - the others now reside in a colo data center


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