By Stephen Doherty, Principal IT Project Manager
There are big IT projects at every company and in everyone’s career. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the largest IT infrastructure project in EMC’s history. Simple, open a datacenter, migrate all of the applications, close a data center.
One of our Massachusetts data centers had served EMC and Data General well for decades. However, we were constrained by power, cooling and space. It was also far too close to our other data center to protect EMC from a regional disaster like Hurricane Sandy. EMC selected Durham, North Carolina to build out a new 20,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art data center.
First mover advantage
We’ve written a lot about our Durham Cloud Data Center in the past. We purchased the Durham site in October 2009 and planned to close the near-capacity Massachusetts data center by December 31, 2012. If the migration took longer, we estimated that it would cost EMC millions of dollars in 2013 to extend the lease and staff, power, cool and insure the facility. Three years, no problem—except the Durham facility was a warehouse, not a data center. The facility remodel wouldn’t be ready until October 2010, giving us eight quarters to migrate more than 2,500 servers and 500 applications and a ninth quarter to decommission the Westborough facility.
