Why Are You Migrating?

One of the first questions that you need to ask yourself is “Why am I migrating?”.
There are probably several reasons for migrating. These may include some of the following:
• server / software is old
• server /software is failing
• current support level is not what I require
• current level of access is too restrictive
• feature list is too restrictive
• costs are too high
• current host is in the wrong location (US vs UK, for example)

The choices you make for your new server / host / system should be based on the motivation for your migration. You should also allow for your future plans otherwise you will find that you need to migrate again if you start a new project that requires something that you do not have.

Your Migration Budget

It is a fact of life that most businesses do not budget for a migration. It is a “hidden” cost, if you like. Things like development, research, new systems, etc. are easy to budget for because they are obvious costs. A migration is often not budgeted for because until you need to migrate your systems you will not think about it! However, every business that uses servers will, at some stage, need to upgrade to newer systems. If your accounts dept. does not already budget then raise the point with them. On average you should expect to perform a migration every two to five years.

What Should I Migrate?

Deciding what you are going to migrate is a fundamental step in planning your migration. If you are moving to a new server with a fresh operating system then take the opportunity to do some spring cleaning on your data! It is always a good idea to keep data backups for historical reasons but this does not mean that your new shiny server needs to have all that data in it! You may find, for example, that you have thousands of old emails dating back to year 200x which you haven’t looked at in years…, do you really need to transfer these to your new email server? You may have backup files from the last time that you did a migration – do you need these transferred to your new server or would they be better off sitting on an external hard drive in your office drawer? If you are not sure then it is always better to have too much than too little, especially when storage space is so cheap these days. But if you know you don’t really need it, why go to the expense of transferring your dead wood to your new systems?

Planning your time frame

Every now and again we get a phone call that goes along the lines of:
“Hi, my server is dying and I need it migrated this weekend as a matter of urgency”.
Or words to that affect.

If your server is that bad then why have you left it so long before doing something about it? We get people telling us that their server has been playing up for months but recently it has been really bad. The chances are, especially if you have a hard drive problem, that pulling all your data off it will be the final nail in the coffin! As soon as you realise that there is a problem you need to be proactive; at the very least back up your essential data!

Another thing to consider is that if you are going to ask someone to perform a migration at very short notice then you will expect to pay a premium. Not only are you asking them to stop working on other projects they are dealing with, you are also asking them to potentially give up their free time in order to meet your deadline!

Then there’s the the testing phase of a migration. You should be prepared to test your new systems thoroughly before you relaunch. Nobody will understand how your site works like you do. Test, test and test again! Take this testing phase into account when you plan your migration time frame and be prepared to wait for problems to be resolved. Fixing a problem is usually a very fast process; actually tracking down the cause of a problem can take hours of delving in file systems and checking permissions, modules, settings, etc. If you have access to the original developer of the software / website then they will probably be able to tell you what the problem is and how to fix it very quickly!

When Should I Re-launch?

The re-launch is the single most important stage to plan for! re-launching means swapping from your existing server to your shiny new one. Things to consider are:
• if it all goes wrong how quickly can I switch back to the existing server?
• if it does go wrong who will be available to help put it right?
• have I made sure that I am available to ensure that the process goes smoothly?

When you re-launch, unfortunately things can go wrong no matter how much testing has been undertaken. 90% of problems will become apparent and be resolved during the testing phase. That still leaves 10% potentially unaccounted for. In the rare circumstance that something does go wrong you need to have someone available to help put things right.
The upshot of this is that re-launching at 2am on a Sunday morning is a bad idea. Very bad! The re-launch process requires clear thinking and the availability of people who can help sort things out. It is worth bearing in mind that a re-launch should not, in most cases, require more than one hour of downtime and it is often considerably less. Sometimes it is possible to make the switch over with no downtime at all but this is rare and depends on a number of factors.

Our philosophy is that the best time to perform a re-launch is on a Monday or Tuesday morning between 8am and 10am. This means that there is enough time to do preparation (re-sync files, mail and databases) before major traffic starts hitting the server. Also the start of the week means that you have four of five days of access to people who can help put things right. There is nothing worse than having your website or server off line and not being able to get in touch with someone to fix it!

The Final Stages

Okay, great – the website or server has been transferred and is now live! Nobody noticed any downtime and everything is running much faster than it was! There will now be a few days where you will probably notice little niggles – for example, your spam filtering isn’t working as well as it was. During this phase you need to decide whether any problems are migration related or not. If you suddenly notice that a script on your website is not working (this should really have been picked up during the testing phase) then investigation will be required to put it right. Extra time will be spent on the migration to resolve such problems and hence there will be overages incurred (did I mention how important the pre re-launch testing phase was?).

Once everything is resolve and your server is running well the migration is over. Go and visit your accounting dept. and make sure that they are putting the money aside for your next migration in a few years time!

Author: Michael Moore, SEM Solutions

The team at SEM Solutions have been investigating enterprise level tools for improving the speed and performance of large high-traffic websites and have recently discovered a powerful open source solution called Varnish. The team behind Varnish make their money providing enterprise level support, integration & configuring it all nicely. Their client list is small but incredibly impressive. Top of the list is Facebook with a testimonial from David Recordon, Head of open source initiatives at Facebook. If this isn’t enough then there are 5 more clients listed including MercadoLibre, the largest online trading platform and the market leader in e-commerce in Latin America! Read the MercadoLibre testimonial & case study here.

After a number of successful installs of the Varnish software we are looking to make this available as an option to all our migration customers. It is refreshing to find success and innovation still alive and kicking in the open source software market, particularly in the area of website and server performance which is only going to become a bigger issue over the next few years.

The Varnish website confidently states that ‘Varnish Cache is most often the single most critical piece of software in a web based business.’ With clients like Facebook standing alongside them & confirming this when stating ‘Varnish is our favored HTTP cache and we use it heavily; whenever you load photos and profile pictures of your friends on Facebook, there’s a very good chance that Varnish is involved’ then this is clearly a tool that must be taken seriously.

For more information on our work with Varnish, and how we can use it to significantly reduce the  operational costs of running a large website then call us on +44 (0)1797 361 688.

From the 1st March 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will be able to regulate marketing communications on company websites for the first time. The following statement is from www.asa.org.uk – “From 1 March 2011 the ASA’s online remit now extends to cover companies’ own marketing claims on their own websites and in other non-paid for space they control. This landmark development brings enhanced consumer protection, particularly for children.”

It’s impossible to know the impact of this change without some real-life cases to go on so I guess we’ll just have to watch this space for the moment.

Read the ASA’s own post on this development.

As one of the only specialist migration providers in the UK we have a wealth of experience of working with cloud hosting. But what exactly is the ‘cloud’? Our view is that this is a much misused term and this misuse is creating confusion in the business community. To compound the issue, the term ‘cloud’ means different things depending on who’s using it.

Cloud Computing Examples

Applied to computing the word ‘cloud’ is highly ambiguous. Type ‘The Cloud’ into Google and you will get a mix of results that include; providers of public access Wi-Fi hotspots, hosting companies offering a form of virtualized hosting and providers of Cloud Computing which generally means location-independent computing or is sometimes referred to as ‘software as a service’ (e.g. Microsoft Azure or Google Docs.) What this boils down to is that the term ‘Cloud’ is used as a variety of metaphors for ‘the internet’ and location-independent IT services.

For the purposes of this article I will be discussing Cloud hosting & Cloud computing and not public access Wi-Fi hotspots.

Cloud Hosting

Shared hosting has been around for a long time. More recently we’ve seen the coming of age of ‘virtualization’ technology. This freed up computers, which had traditionally only been able to run a single instance of an operating system or computing environment, to be able to run virtual machines instead. Suddenly this created an opportunity for the hosting companies to charge clients on a per-usage basis and virtualization has since become part of an overall trend in hosting and corporate IT.

An older concept of ‘grid computing’ was brought to life through the use of virtualization. An operating system could exist across many servers instead of one. The client only pays for the resources he uses while also getting the benefit of huge scaleability that was never really available to the masses before virtualization came along. Applications could now tap into the resources of a whole network of hardware instead of a single machine.

For hosting companies there was another benefit. At enterprise level there has been a tradition of over-selling hosting services. Companies were being sold powerful dedicated servers yet more often than not they were only using a fraction of the resources available to them. I suspect that this was, for a long time, a source of irritation to the enterprise level hosting companies. They would have looked at all these unused resources and seen a missed opportunity. Cloud computing was the solution. Clients pay for exactly what they use. No more wasted resources. Everyone wins.

Cloud Computing

Essentially, Cloud computing is any form of location-independent computing. Since the mid-eighties we’ve become used to working with ever more powerful personal computers on which we install software such as word processors or email clients. This represented a significant change from the previous decade when mainframe computing dominated the corporate environment. Since the mid-nineties we’ve enjoyed the benefits of the Internet and we’ve been able to stay connected while moving around more freely. When broadband was introduced it created the possibility of moving significant chunks of IT online. Online trading became a reality, Ecommerce was born and email took over as the dominant form of corporate communication. Companies empowered their staff by moving data centres (e.g. customer databases) online and allowing them access to this information from anywhere provided they had an Internet connection. Everything from stock control to customer service was streamlined and web-enabled. But certain computing services were more stubborn such as word processing. These stayed on the local machine until cloud computing came along. Now, even word processors can be accessed online. Google offers it’s own web-based equivalent of Microsoft Office free of charge – it is called Google Docs. Microsoft is pursuing its paid for model and offering its Office suite and more, as a web-based Cloud-computing service.

So, what could you migrate to the Cloud? Almost all of your IT functions / infrastructure can be externally hosted these days, and therefore all of your IT can potentially be moved to the Cloud. This includes almost all of the software your business relies on, although I must point out that one company – Sage – and its popular accounting software is probably proving the bottle neck for getting all IT onto a hosted environment. Almost every other IT function can be moved out of the office and onto an external hosted environment. With the Cloud you get pricing that makes this an investment worth considering. Especially in today’s difficult economic environment. So, here’s a (by no means complete) list of the commonly used IT services that can move to either Cloud hosting or Cloud computing…

• All types of websites (CRM, eCommerce, blogs, social networks etc.)
• Email communication services.
• All types of web-enabled databases (e.g. your customer database.)
• Business management software.
• Office software (word processors etc.)
• File storage.
• Media sharing (images, videos, music etc.)

What Benefits Does the Cloud Offer?

To me, the cloud (small ‘c’) is a metaphor for remote computing, and it defines the way I like to do business now. I no longer need to worry about my location because I can access all of my business data over any web-enabled device whether it be my Powerbook, my HTC Android phone or a friend’s computer. It also means I worry less about backing up data from local machines. As I’ve moved more of my computing to the cloud I’ve needed to keep less data on my personal devices. Hardware is therefore (and perhaps ironically) becoming less important to me. This has enabled me to create a robust, ever evolving & infinitely scaleable IT infrastructure with virtually no capital expenditure and very low running costs. I need very little support and I have a high sense of satisfaction as a customer using these services.

Many of the services we use such as Google Docs are even free, and as a company we now use Google Docs more than we use Microsoft Office. If you’ve ever wanted to collaborate on a spreadsheet it is indeed a revolution! We’ve got websites hosted on ‘The Cloud’ and we’re huge fans of companies like 37-Signals who provide brilliant software as a service (SAAS) such as Basecamp for project management or Highrise for our CRM. Services in the ‘Cloud’ seem to share another benefit – they can be set up very quickly. No more waiting for servers to be commissioned or software to be installed and configured. And the configuration can also be changed quickly and with no down-time. For example, when we’re working on cloud servers we often ramp up the RAM, dropping it back to the original setting when the work is finished. This is a big win in today’s fast moving business environment.

What about the downsides?

I suppose the most important thing to consider when considering using the cloud in its many forms is connectivity. Accessing the cloud relies on having a fast internet connection. Especially with today’s rich user interfaces and dynamic content.

We’ve experienced problems with database connectivity on a cloud web-hosting environment in the past but only on 1 occasion.

What else can we add to this list? I invite you to share any negative experiences of cloud computing here…

Migrating to the Cloud

We’ve carried out many migrations to the various types of cloud for our clients, giving us an unrivaled wealth of expertise in this area. As with the many uses of the term ‘cloud’ there are also many ways of migrating to the cloud and it would be misleading to give the impression that all your IT functions can be migrated as part of a single process.

As a business using the cloud, our process of migrating to the cloud was actually a variety of processes, carried out independently of each other over the course of 2 to 3 years. Different aspects of the business required different solutions and the migration process was unique for each. And we use a variety of providers.

Before making any IT decision careful consideration needs to be taken. But unlike traditional and costly IT solutions the risks, in my view, are often much lower with the cloud. For example, cloud hosting companies & software providers do not normally require lengthy contracts to be signed, and services can be turned on and off almost instantly. Trials can be run with little risk before long term decisions are taken. This to me is a significant USP for the cloud in general. Speed is everything today. And today it is the 26th of January 2011. I look forward to reading your comments.

> Contact us if you’re thinking of migrating to the Cloud.

We’ve carried out many migrations to the various types of ‘Cloud’ for our clients, giving us an unrivaled wealth of expertise when it comes to Cloud migrations.

Migrating to these solutions takes careful planning and expert execution in order to minimise the disruption to your business. This is where our expertise comes in. With first hand experience of most forms of the Cloud we can give sound advice helping you to make the best decisions for your business. We can also plan and manage any Cloud migration ensuring a smooth and painless transition. Our migration service has won awards, and some of the biggest and best hosting companies in the world regularly recommend us to their customers. – that’s how good we are!