We are changing data centres

Until now, our platforms ran in a Virtual Data Center at a Swiss provider. As part of our preparation for ISO/IEC 27001, we re-evaluated our hosting partner against three criteria: the provider’s certification, response times when we need support, and the state of the infrastructure. hosttech came out best on all three.

What changes and what doesn’t

We don’t buy hardware and we don’t rent a rack. We run our own virtual servers in a Virtual Data Center: we set up and operate the network, firewall, storage and container platform ourselves. The physical servers underneath, power, cooling and connectivity are provided by the partner. That was already the case and remains so. What is new is the partner, and with it the address where the servers are located.

The partner

hosttech operates data centres certified to ISO 27001. Our systems run at the Swiss locations of Nottwil (LU) and Gais (AR); the data does not leave Switzerland. In hosttech’s Virtual Data Center, we configure virtual servers, networks and storage ourselves and have them ready in minutes. For non-production environments, we can also use the provider’s database and storage services instead of operating every database ourselves.

The plan

Internal applications and our own website move first. After that, deliberately slowly: we won’t bring any migration forward before the end of February, so that we can check the stability of the new environment. For each application, one person from the DevOps team is responsible, from the database to the DNS, and an application is moved with all its environments in one go.

Because our IP addresses change with the switch, we coordinate the changeover with our clients’ IT: interfaces, firewall rules, DNS changeover, a joint date. The move is free of charge for clients and causes around 15 minutes of downtime per application.

Your project lead will answer any questions about your platform. How the move went is described in the review.