Prepping Bladecenter for Colocation

After weeks of negotiations and months of construction delays, our hosting provider has finally installed 220 VAC power into our rack space where we colocate some of our IT services. With that finally ready, we can move the IBM Bladecenter that I’ve been working with for the past several months into the colocation site, along with it’s multi-terabyte IBM SAN. It’s the first step in production deployment for three critical services for us: Our new financial management system, our GroupWise 7 SP1 upgrade, and our second off-site backup system.

We’ve been preparing for ages, and it’s going to be nice to finally get the system installed in its new home. I’m particularly looking forward to being able to start the GroupWise 7 upgrade. That will be a big undertaking, and we’re doing comprehensive user training at the same time that we roll out the GW 7 client to our users. GroupWise 7 has some nice features that will make managing GroupWise easier for us and avoid another space incident, plus a lot of great improvements in the client that will really help our users be more productive.