So this is a COLO
The IT COLO Clean out -
When I came on board in 2014 at CSU Fresno, I took about 3 weeks to investigate the technology footprint, of the college I was now in charge of in order to create a plan to move forward based on those findings. What I found was a COLO with 15 servers, many EOL, that were running redundant systems the same as our department sys admins were running. What the heck?? Why was the department not using the centralized systems?
I learned that way back when each department had their own admins and only recently were all of the colleges centralized and there was still some carry over from the old methodologies including old systems.
OK, let's take these old colo servers P to V or physical to virtual and decommission any unneeded systems, and centralize everything else.
Since this was a rather large project that would affect the college at large, and there are not many times students would get the opportunity to work in a server room environment I laid out a plan that would enable no down time, and brought my students in for a learning experience. Pictures speak a thousand words and the smiles from the students say it all.
My Lead student tech at the time Pao Moua
Lots of question, and lots of answers. Could have gone a lot faster, but I took the time to ensure everything asked was explained in detail for the students.
Eye on the prize. Days like this are my best days. Hands on, real world lessons education they can take with them.
It's blurry but he's having the time of his life working on this project. Like I said above, a pic is worth a thousand words... his smile says it all.
All servers that we still needed were put in the cloud, either on prem. in the MDF VM stack, or on our off campus AWS instance. The project took 2 weeks and would save the department about $30,000 dollars a year.
