We were looking at cost savings measures and found that 1) we were
dedicating a large office space to servers, really quite a bit more
than they needed, but we didn't have a good space that was smaller to
move them into and 2) we were considering sharing office space with
another group to share our rent costs and they would need office space.
From a space utilization and cost savings standpoint it made a lot of
sense to move our physical equipment to the DCL Shared data center than
to continue to keep it or to try and remodel our space to accommodate
our needs. Additionally, we're in a leased building with a 100 Mbps
connection to the outside world / campus so we gained better networking
for our server infrastructure at no cost as well as redundant power,
better cooling and better monitoring.
The actual experience itself was extremely straight forward and
consisted of an initial meeting with Data Center Shared Services group
to discuss what equipment we had, our networking/power requirements.
We had a few rounds of follow up emails to answer a few questions
that we could answer at the meeting and after that everything was set.
DCSS came out to our site before hours one more to help move the
physical equipment and were extremely helpful (they brought their van
to help transport the equipment and helped un-cable it from the rack it
was currently housed in once it was powered down).
We were back and running within an hour of their departure from our site and it was essentially transparent to my end users.
As far as working with the data center group on an ongoing basis,
I'm able to do almost all my work remotely via SSH/remote desktop which
is how I was operating in my building so really there's no change in
that respect. Once in a great while I'll need to swap a tape in our
library or put a physical DVD in a drive but it's really no trouble at
all to drive over to campus and stop in the ops center to gain access
for what I need to do. The staff there have been nothing but friendly
and helpful, for instance they've been very helpful and loaned me screw
drivers when I forgot my set.
Overall, it's been nothing but a positive experience and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.