We are preparing a feasibility study on co-locating our server room to an off-site data center. The co-location will not include virtualization, simply physically re-locating all servers off-site. As far as Tessitura software, and all related Tessitura services such as the SQL servers, Report Server, Credit Card server, etc., I'd like to find out others input on what the potential impact would be, what issues might arise from not having the Tessitura servers physically on-site, how often and for what reason the servers might need to be physically managed, issues related to remote management, etc. Who previsouly has co-located the Tessitura servers to an off-site data center and any other thoughts about pros and cons of a data center move.Thank you.
Randall A Mitchell
Hi Randall,
Our consortium has been with a co-lo from the beginning (almost 4 years now) and for the most part it's served our needs very well. Our biggest concerns were security, internet connectivity speed and uptime, which is why we couldn't host them ourselves. More recently we've taken steps to become PCI compliant but I understand that not all facilities have this capability.
The servers themselves require little physical attention. There have been times where one of the servers has frozen or not rebooted properly after patching. At that point someone had to physically go there and push a button but we've since purchased remote power switches. Almost all other management (software installs, patches, updates, defragging, etc.) can be done remotely.
We conduct 1st level of support ourselves, which include tasks that don't affect the operating system, like backups, disk space and SQL job monitoring but an outside company manages bigger ticket items for us, like server updates, off-siting data, and any network issues.
~Dan
Dan, thanks. I appreciate your input. Is your local offices Citrix/Terminal services, or are you running under a windows domain? Has Tessitura performance been noticeably slower one way or the other?
We use Terminal Services. Tessitura performance is noticeably slower to respond only when our local internet connection is taking a hit.