It’s moving time …

In this age of cloud computing, it may seem odd to still have physical server assets – and it’s true that a number of our workloads have been migrated to the cloud – but frankly if you’re not averse to getting your hands a little dirty (or have some engineers like we do who love their hardware) – you can squeeze a lot more performance for a lot less money out of your co-located servers than would be possible with a cloud-only implementation, and here at Lightspeed, our long-standing motto of “faster, cheaper, better” means we like parking all our latency sensitive stuff as close to the customers as possible with ample sub 30 ms to multiple urban centers around ASEAN.

Frankly, I’d prefer never to move – but when the entire building is sold and turning into some kind of central kitchen – it’s really time to move – and if you’re gonna have to do it, I say we do it right – time for an upgrade!

After touring a bunch of data centers, we picked what we think is the best available option. Unsurprisingly, it’s in Singapore – sitting on bedrock in the middle of a tectonic plate – with no natural disasters. Singapore’s location also makes it an ideal site for edge networking in the SEA region, allowing lower latency and better user experiences for our customer’s end-users. We also wanted a Tier 3 data centre – with multiple paths for power and cooling and systems in place to update and maintain it without taking it offline. Expected uptime is a healthy 99.982% (1.6 hours of downtime annually). We would have gone for Tier 4 – if such a beast existed.

So we chatted with our neighbors a few floors up (STT GDC) and decided we’d pick one of their 7 data centers In Singapore ( 80 around the world) to park our server assets in.

STT GDC Command Centre

Moving in turned out to be a lot of planning – and at least for the first server we moved in – smooth as silk – just 30 minutes to test the two PSUs (what’s the point of having redundant PDU if you only have a single PSU in each server?), slide in those tool-less rails and power up the server.

We’ll have more details when we’re done moving in, but here’s a shot of the suite:

Check out all that thermal management gear in yellow! Ducting out hot air and blanking plates are best practice.

We’ll be in moving mode for the next 3 weeks – so do let us know if you notice any glitches – we really hope there aren’t any, because we’ve done a lot of pre-migration planning!

The users impacted by each server migration will receive their planned migration date in the next couple of days. August is gonna be busy!

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