Successful Data Centre Network Migration

Background

South Lanarkshire Council provide a range of critical services to the people of South Lanarkshire including health, education, emergency services and social welfare. The applications running these services were hosted on infrastructure in an aging data centre which was due close and be demolished in December 2022. 

Starfish partnered with DataVita through the entire project lifecycle, from pre-sales through to design, build, and migration to DV1, DataVita’s primary data centre facility. DataVita were the primary contractor providing hosting and taking responsibility for the compute and storage components, while Starfish led on all activities relating to the network. 

‍

Project Objectives

The key objectives of the project were as follows. 

• Design and build a secure, resilient, performant, and observable network suitable for hosting council services. 
• Migrate critical council services to the DV1 facility. 
• Complete the project within budget and in time for the December 2022 deadline. 
• Minimise disruption to service.

‍

Approach

Starfish were involved in the project end to end, with the approach covering pre-sales, design and planning, build, migration, and early life support.

‍

Pre-Sales Phase: Starfish supported the lead partner DataVita in responding to the SLC tender. This included the following activities. 

• Assessment of the requirement. 
• Development of a high-level architecture solution. 
• Development of a network Bill of Materials. 
• Scoping of the level of effort required to deliver the network component of the project. 
• Creating a response to the tender document. 

‍

Design and Planning Phase: In this phase Starfish created a set of project artefacts including those listed below. 

• Network High Level Design
• Network Low Level Design
• Network Test Plan
• Network Migration Plan

‍

The HLD described the physical and logical architectures and demonstrated how they would help to meet the SLC requirements. The HLD also described and justified all technology vendor decisions, as well as providing a detailed BoM. The LLD contained all design information required to carry out the network build, this included but was not limited to network inventory, port allocations, VLANs and trunks, IP address schemes and routing, as well as firewall and load balancing policy. 

Given the criticality of the service, the test plan was used to comprehensively test every component of the network. The test categories included connectivity testing, functional testing, failover testing and policy testing. The migration plan was used to describe both the approach to migration and the temporary design used to migration services to the new DV1 environment. 

‍

Build Phase:

The initial network build was crucial to the success of the entire project, as without it the compute and storage builds could not take place and network migration could not commence. The network was built directly in DV1, where it was implemented in line with the LLD and tested according to the Network Test Plan. Once the build was completed, Starfish worked closely with the wider DataVita team, and SLC to integrate other infrastructure and application components with the network. 

‍

Migration Phase:

With the build complete and using the Network Migration Plan, Starfish built both Layer 2 and Layer 3 interconnects to the legacy SLC environment to their tertiary data centre. Once these interconnects were in place and tested, it allowed for the migration of servers and services to DV1. Once all services had moved over Starfish managed the migration of the Internet and WAN edge from the legacy data centre to DV1, including the movement of the firewalls and load balancers. 

‍

Early Life Support:

Following completion of the migration Starfish provided early life support to both DataVita and SLC. This involved operating as a point of escalation of network issues, implementing network monitoring and visibility tools, and providing ad-hoc training to DataVita and SLC operations teams. 

‍

Technology

The data centre network fabric was built on Cisco ACI. A Multi-POD and Multi-Site design was used with two PODs located in different DV1 halls to form one site and the other site consisting of two PODs at SLC locations. The Cisco Cisco ACI design also included multiple Layer 2 Outs and Layer 3 Outs, along with Transit Routing. FirePower Threat Defence was used for firewalling and F5 Big IP was used for load balancing.  

‍

Conclusion 

Starfish delivered a bespoke network design for SLC, which allowed for migration of all services to DV1 before the December 2022 deadline, within budget and with minimal disruption. This demonstrated the full breath of Starfish capabilities from pre-sales and network architecture, through to design, build and migration. The project showcased, Starfish’s ability to thrive in very complex environments and deliver a successful outcome for all stakeholders, including the end customer and the partner.