Moving servers to colocation - network considerations for the inexperienced

Dryst999

Hey guys, I'm tasked with pricing out a potential migration from on-prem to a colo facility for our internal servers. Our firm is potentially moving twice over the next two years so we are trying to figure out if placing our equipment in a colo would be a better solution. We have 1 cabinet worth of equipment and I'm aware of most things I should spec out for this move (power, security, access, etc) but the networking portion is a little out of my comfort zone.

Right now we have two ISP's for our internal network, Cogent and AT&T. We have about 15 servers including a file server, dc, and several app servers that we plan on putting in the colo. With that in mind, what are our options for to interconnect the office and colo? I have a few ideas below but not sure if I'm on the right track.

• Purchase a firewall for the colocation, use the blended ISP they offer (50Mbps burstable to 100), have firm connect to servers over IPSec VPN.
• Upgrade to MPLS and bring our own network into the colo. Would we need a layer 3 switch for this?

Do the above options look right? Is there another way that would be better? Thanks in advance for your help.

alias454

I know this doesn't answer your specific question but have you thought about moving your workloads to something like AWS or Azure? just trying to understand why a colo is preferable?

Dryst999

We have, the reoccurring costs for the amount of data we have is about triple what it would cost for the colo.

Kreken

Dryst999 wrote: »

Right now we have two ISP's for our internal network, Cogent and AT&T. We have about 15 servers including a file server, dc, and several app servers that we plan on putting in the colo. With that in mind, what are our options for to interconnect the office and colo? I have a few ideas below but not sure if I'm on the right track.

• Purchase a firewall for the colocation, use the blended ISP they offer (50Mbps burstable to 100), have firm connect to servers over IPSec VPN.
• Upgrade to MPLS and bring our own network into the colo. Would we need a layer 3 switch for this?

Do the above options look right? Is there another way that would be better? Thanks in advance for your help.

How is your failover setup between two ISP's now? If you are not running BGP, for the colo, I would get a couple of ASA, setup them up in active/standby cluster with static route tracking between two ISP's.

To connect colo to the office, the cheapest solution would be site-to-site VPN. I would get another ASA for the office. If you will get the Internet handoff from the same provider, your latency should be minimal. Site-to-site VPN should be sufficient if you don't have latency sensetive or high bandwidth apps running. If you do, I would look into either MPLS or EPL.

Another design consideration would be to setup second domain controller and leave it in the office. Setup DNS, DHCP and make it GC. It will make your users happy.

chmod

For some reason the majority of the people in the IT world thinks the cloud is the only solution, also they think is a cheap solution that will save millions of dollars.

There are other options, cloud is a very good one but is not a one size fits all. Some things are better to keep them in house, other could be colo other in the cloud.

Cloud is expensive, depending on your infrastructure size and provider is not that easy to maintan(not that difficult either) but it has its constraints.

I remember a boss long time ago when i used to work on the enterprise world that asked me to get a quotation to move everything to the cloud, he did not understand much about the cloud i think he even wanted to move the patch panels, ADSL and access switches/access points to the cloud, when i showed him the price to move the amount of data to the cloud he said NO, just move a couple of old servers so we don't have to buy new ones(they did not need to access anything locally) and wait until the cloud prices drop.

TomkoTech

You could find a local datacenter that will house your gear. Then it would simply be scheduling the down time and physically moving it to a rack hosted by them.

Probably a lot cheaper.