By Beth Goelzer Lyons
Moving Cornell's network computers and servers from the basement of the Computing and Communications Center (CCC) to the seventh floor of Rhodes Hall did not seem like a major campus project. No bulldozers, no cranes, no orange construction fences marked the project's location -- only a few large moving trucks and several announcements about the computing services that would be disrupted.
The disruption turned out to be almost unnoticeable: a day for the relocation of Theory Center computers in early November, less than a day for the CornellC mainframe at Thanksgiving and less than two days for the 80 servers, including mail and web services, in late December. Each of those moves was expected to take longer, even by optimistic estimates.
But the move's success belies its complexity. In less than four months, nearly 1,000 pieces of computer and support equipment, more than 30,000 computer tapes and offices for some 55 people were relocated. Floor plans were drawn and redrawn. The Rhodes Hall computer room was completely rearranged, and 18 miles of fiber-optic cable and several thousand strands of copper wire went under its floor.
How did the Theory Center and Cornell Information Technology staff do it? "This was a real team effort," said Peter M. Siegel, director of CIT's Network and Computing Systems (NCS) division. "IBM worked elbow-to-elbow with us, using their planning experience with commercial moves to our benefit. Folks at the library, Facilities and Campus Services, the Transportation Office and other groups around campus bent over backwards to help make this successful."
Syracuse Office Equipment and Sun contributed their expertise. Even the weather cooperated, allowing contingency plans for blizzards and ice storms to be set aside.
"The shops people -- especially Jake Benninger and Danny Robinson's crews -- were among the heroes in this move. They met some extremely unreasonable deadlines that we put upon them," said Peter Baker, NCS operations manager and computer room design and construction leader.
"Everybody kept a great attitude. They gave up their holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, they spent a lot of extra time developing detailed plans for each phase of the move and they were always in good spirits. Whenever someone needed a hand, others pitched in. Normally, a project of this size and complexity would require a year to plan and execute -- we had six months at best. The team that came together were all leaders," said NCS associate director James F. Doolittle, who headed up the relocation effort.
The Rhodes Hall computer room is a far superior facility for Cornell's computing resources. The quarter-acre space was specifically built to house high-performance computers, from the wiring infrastructure and environmental conditions to the raised floor.
"We brought in new wiring that can carry higher speeds of data with significantly greater reliability and replaced all shared network connections with switched ones, which will give us better, more reliable performance for the servers and network monitoring systems. And we still have room to expand the technology infrastructure," said Sanjay Hiranandani, NCS network engineer and network design and construction leader.
These improvements mean that problems can be discovered and corrected much more quickly and that new technologies can be more easily integrated. The campus should see improved overall network performance and reliability, officials say.
The December move was the largest and most complex phase. More than 40 people arrived by 7 a.m. Dec. 26 to move 80 servers, about 500 pieces of equipment in all. The Network Operations Center's (NOC) equipment was moved Dec. 27.
"One of the challenges was making sure we could monitor the campus networks at all times. We set up a little makeshift NOC, which will remain -- with one phone and a couple workstations -- as an emergency NOC at CCC," said Andrea Beesing, NCS manager of network operations. By 10 p.m. Dec. 27, all services, including the NOC, were back in production, several days early.
"The success of this move proves that when you have people with different skills all working really closely together and depending on each other, you can move mountains," said NCS special projects manager Billie Dodge, whose relocation of 49 NCS staff from CCC to Rhodes Hall threatened Ithaca's bubble wrap supply.
The computer consolidation project was led by NCS's Daniel Adinolfi, Peter Baker, Mark Bodenstein, Billie Dodge, James F. Doolittle, Sanjay Hiranandani and Paul Zarnowski, and by Theory Center operations manager Benjamin Brown.
Photograph of some of the consolidation project group
Background story about the consolidation
Background story about the Dec. move