10/31/2012
Project Spotlight: Blazing fast servers...
Well, its been too long since we posted any news. So I thought I would get the ball rolling again with a short blog-style post on a project we completed a few months ago.
One of our customers needed to replace two aging and unreliable servers. They had been running on fumes for some time and an upcoming business expansion was the tipping point to take the plunge and address the issue head-on.
This project was going to take some serious acrobatics - replace the primary domain controller, migrating from Server 2003 to Server 2008, upgrade the database infrastructure, migrate multiple business specific applications and their underlying databases. I would liken this project to something like this: Take a house with, say, fifty people living in it. Lift it off the ground, pour a new foundation under it, set the house back down and please don't break any China in the process. Oh, and do all that over a weekend.
Okay, we really couldn't pull that off in a weekend, so the customer agreed to one day of downtime and we set to work planning the migration.
I'll be honest - this project was a real bear. We fought with software conflicts and flakey installation packages (from companies that really, really should be able to do better). There was a lot of twists and turns and thinking-on-our-feet. At the end of the day, we were about 80% functional when everyone came back to work on Tuesday and 95% by the end of day one. The last 5% took a few more days to work through the final wrinkles.
Today, the investment is paying off. Not only in the peace of mind that the servers and backup processes are rock solid, but in big productivity boosts as employees are spending more time working and less time waiting for servers to come back online or watching an hourglass on their screen.
From the moment people started logging on that first day - there were many comments about the speed of the new system. And, truly, these servers are blazing fast. Here’s the techy specs, for you fellow geeks:
- Dual Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5 Processors - These are the latest and greatest from Intel, based on the Sandy-Bridge architecture
- 32GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
- Adaptec 6805 6Gb/s SAS RAID controller running RAID 10 volumes on Kingston Enterprise SSD
The combination of the new Sandy Bridge CPUs and the RAID 10 SSD storage is just ridiculously fast, better than we had hoped for. And for this customer, that matters a lot. Data is entered, reports are generated, tickets and invoices are printed, everything happens more quickly and that means more gets done in less time and everyone is happier.
