Datalink, a leading provider of data centre infrastructure and services, has announced the successful completion of a data centre relocation project for Trek Bicycle Corporation, the global bicycle and cycling product manufacturer with direct sales in 25 countries and distribution in more than 90 countries.
Separate pre-production and production migrations from Trek’s headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, to a Tier 3 colocation facility 30 miles away were planned and orchestrated by Datalink’s Advanced Services team and Trek IT on tight weekend schedules. This has enabled Trek to increase security, improve disaster recovery abilities, and accelerate delivery of corporate applications.
“This project had no room for failure,” said Bryan Turner, IT Senior Global Director at Trek Bicycle Corporation. “An unexpected outage would have cost the company millions of dollars in revenue per day. We engaged Datalink because they have a dedicated data centre relocation practice with established procedures and experienced personnel that we knew would minimize our risk.”
He continued, “Their methodology, tools, vendor recertification abilities, partnerships with moving companies, and expertise in coordinating all the moving parts ensured that we were back up and running according to plan, even though we were managing outages for retailers and internal business users in seven different time zones.”
Data centre relocation is a cornerstone of Datalink’s Advanced Services portfolio, which also includes application and system migration, cloud strategy and execution, disaster recovery planning, and related data centre transformation, cloud services and IT resiliency offerings.
These services complement the company’s suite of data centre-related technology solutions and services, enabling ‘Datalink to assist customers at every stage of the IT lifecycle’.
The Trek project involved relocating more than 300 virtual machines and 150 applications ranging from a proprietary business-to-business system utilized by over 8,000 Trek dealers/distributors globally, through to email, ERP, demand planning, engineering, product lifecycle management and business intelligence applications.
Goals included updating and strengthening Trek’s data centre infrastructure, freeing in-house data centre space and power needs for use by the company’s expanding manufacturing operations, and solving bandwidth problems created by Trek’s headquarters location in a town of 3,300 with limited service.
Trek’s test and development infrastructure was moved first, followed by production servers and applications two months later. Both moves began on a Friday after close of business, with systems brought back online on the Saturday for testing and returned to full operation on Sunday or Monday depending on time zone.
Trek’s new SSAE 16-audited and ISO 27001-certified colocation facility in Madison provides increased physical security including retina eye scans for entry; redundant communication, power and cooling; improved connectivity that expedites data delivery to end users as far away as Brazil, Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Australia; and a location that is less vulnerable to tornadoes and flooding than at the company’s headquarters.
Additional high availability, disaster recovery and business continuity protections are provided because pre-production and production systems are located in different rooms separated by thick concrete walls, inhibiting the spread of fire from one room to another.
“Moving a data centre requires a different set of skills and tools than other IT projects, not to mention hundreds of hours of planning and project management as well as precision timing.,” said Steve Zipperman, VP Advanced Services, Datalink. “This successful engagement with Trek is a direct result of the processes and expertise we have built to provide incident-free moves that get our customers’ new data centres up and running even with the tightest cutover timelines.”
www.datalink.com
www.trekbikes.com
