The IT Weapons Data Centre Relocation Project
The Challenge: Expand Data Centre Physical Space and Increase Power
IT Weapons’ Data Centre had reached its maximum capacity with respect to space and power. They needed to relocate to a better facility to meet the expanding requirements of existing customers and accomodate their future goals. IT Weapons needed a facility that was state-of-the-art, offered fully redundant power, supported blade technology, and would allow for long-term expansion. It took the IT Weapons consulting team four months to select the right Data Centre facility, five months to plan the Data Centre move, and five weeks to execute the plan; ensuring that the mission-critical data and systems of their customers were minimally impacted.
The Solution: A New and Improved Data Centre
IT Weapons understands that in today's service and support market, customers are demanding fast and efficient response times. Organizations need to stay competitive in a 24/7 ‘always-on’ world . With that in mind, IT Weapons spent more than 1500 hours planning, and redesigning their Data Centre. This resulted in a leading-edge solution for managed services customers. Customers gained the advantage of better performance, increased security, as well as load balancing and full redundancy. And every aspect of the system was designed to accomodate future growth.
Building a Better Performing Data Centre that is Scalable
The hardware improvements at the new IT Weapons Data Centre increased the backbone speed by 4x, and the capacity of the core infrastructure can be upgraded by a further 5x when required. Customers can feel safe knowing they have a scalable Data Centre that can accommodate future power and speed demands.
Becoming Greener
Aware of today's growing trend toward sustainable, green computing, IT Weapons took the opportunity to optimize their equipment's power and cooling efficiency. Every possible device was upgraded rom 120 to 208 volts. What is more, with less processing power being used, less stress is put on the equipment, resulting in an increased lifespan. These changes have reduced IT Weapons' energy consumption by 15-20%. And the new facility's innovations have also reduced IT Weapons' cooling requirements by over 25%.
Increasing Security and Meeting Compliancy Requirements
Security at the Data Centre was built around the industry's best practices. IT Weapons upgraded their hardware devices and developed a fully redundant architecture. This drastically reduced single points of failure in the system. With significant enhancements to their auditing, logging, monitoring, alerting and reporting systems, IT Weapons customers can quickly and confidently respond to audit and compliancy requests.
Enhancing Infrastructure Hosting Services
IT Weapons redesigned the whole virtualization cluster for their hosting services. Customers can benefit from full redundant failover ability, increased performance, and a load balanced environment. Server virtualization, blade server integration, and storage optimization were key areas that were taken into account during the redesign. The equipment runs more efficiently, overall resource utilization is reduced, and customers can rely on IT Weapons to be prepared for future upgrades and enhancements.
Data Centre Statistics
• 500+ physical and virtual servers
• 6500+ users
• 1500 consulting & planning hours
• 32 wide rack cabinets
• 120TB of storage
• All new cable management systems
• 200+ network devices
• 264 crossconnects
• 5500 feet of CAT6 cable
• 600 feet of velcro ties
• 2500 labels
• 300% more interstitial flooring
• 13,000+ lbs of computing hardware
• 200 customer sites migrated