Mission accomplished! Retarus’ DE2 data center has been relocated from the basement of the company’s Munich HQ to noris network’s award-winning colocation MUC5 data center just to the east of Munich. And without any disruption to our ongoing operations!
The move was meticulously planned well in advance – with military precision and right down to the smallest detail. The relocation activities already kicked off in late April with the migration of development and staging systems. From the end of May, we then started moving productive network components. Finally, in an intensive hot phase, the relocation of the productive environment was completed on 28 working days from June 23rd to July 29th.
To be precise, 1,364 servers (116 physical and the rest virtual) were moved to their new homes in high density racks with up to 24 kVA and 60U (rack height units). In line with our other data centers, we took the opportunity to furnish DE2 with cutting-edge network technology based on EVPN/VXLAN and replace all cabling in the data center with fiber optic cables. This paves the way perfectly for any future scaling.
For the DE2 move, we consciously chose to only use Retarus employees. Although the old and new data centers are only 15 kilometers apart, the staff involved in the move covered more than 2,000 kilometers. At Noris, we will continue operating our equipment completely on our own without any third-party access.
When selecting a colocation partner, as always, we paid a great deal of attention to the security and availability of the facility. For the high-security data center in Aschheim, opened in 2017, noris network received the German Data Center Award. MUC5 is a DE-CIX Premium Enabled Site and needless to say it fulfills the very highest security and compliance requirements. Boasting 11,000 square meters of total floor space and an IT area of 8,700 square meters following its expansion in 2019, MUC5 is one of the 10 largest data center facilities in Germany.
Another very important aspect for Retarus was the environmental footprint. Noris is powered exclusively by renewable energy and thanks to cutting-edge modern Kyoto-Cooling technology, the facility manages to get through 90% of the year without resorting to mechanical compressors for cooling. If you’re interested in taking a closer look at the state-of-the-art data center, this virtual tour provides a 360° view inside the facility:
Of course, it wasn’t possible to avoid every single little hiccup during the move. Mostly, these only involved “micro-outages”, each lasting a few seconds, for instance during failover or availability tests. In addition, selected services were rerouted to our data center in Frankfurt (DE1) during the migration. Most customers are unlikely to have noticed anything at all.
The move was completed according to schedule on August 1st. The new, flexible architecture and substantially greater bandwidth mean that Retarus is well-equipped for the future and ensure that we can provide our services with even higher availability and performance to customers with demanding requirements.
