Moving Education based servers into Data Center

[goodmana]

I just wanted to inquiry if anyone else have had any experience of moving their school servers/hosts into a data center, Pros and Cons views welcomed.

 

Thanks in advance

[dhicks]

I just wanted to inquiry if anyone else have had any experience of moving their school servers/hosts into a data center, Pros and Cons views welcomed.

 

We haven't, but we're seriously considering it. Our Internet connection, currently a 10 megabit EFM line, is due for renewal next year and we could replace that with a 100 megabit fibre line to a datacentre. We would then have a 40 megabit connection from that datacentre to the Internet, all for about the same price as our current EFM connection, plus the option of colocating servers at the datacentre, or using their VM infrastructure, or connecting directly to Amazon's infrastructure. It's the kind of thing where we could sign up just for the fibre / Internet connection and add colocation / VM / cloud services later.

 

Advantages would be to do with diaster recovery - we could keep a VM server capable of running our most important VMs (DC, MIS, etc) in the datacentre, ready to take over the instant there was a local problem. The disadvantage would be that we then have to manage a colocated server install - there's bound to be some trips back and forth to the datacentre at some point, and of course you have the monthly cost (probably just for power though, bandwidth should just be between the school and the datacentre, and included in the line rental price). We could use their VM system, or Amazon's, or whoever's, but chances are we'd have to modify how our system worked to match theirs or there would have to be some conversion between VM formats / setups every time you wanted to spin up a remote VM, defeating the point of instant-availability diaster recovery.