On Friday Aug. 9th just after midnight, the network team began the process of removing one of our boundary firewalls and associated network hardware from the rack it has been housed within the State Controller’s Office (SCO) data center for the last four years. Vendor partner CompuNet assisted ITS, providing an enclosed van and padded equipment cases to transport hardware safely to its new home in the Chinden data center.
This work is being done in conjunction with a major redesign of our firewall configuration to improve reliability and survivability of this critical system.
Starting at 11 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 8th, John Brown, Anthony Banta, Josh Hardy, Dan Pelayo, along with two CompuNet staff began preparing equipment to be removed from the rack, packed in the padded shipping boxes, loaded into a rental truck, and transported to Chinden. Besides the actual firewall being moved, a number of switches and routers supporting connectivity had to be packed and transported. In total, nearly $2 million of critical hardware was relocated. Nathen Snodgrass and Almedin Mehmedovic provided firewall support as needed along the way remotely.
At midnight, teams went to work, and by 2 a.m. Friday, equipment was on its way to Chinden. At 4 a.m., it was installed, and the focus was on some lingering issues resulting from the move, which were resolved Friday afternoon. There is still more work to be done to achieve our final goal in the re-configuration of firewalls, but this was a major step forward and a great effort by all. A very impressive team carrying out a very complex and critical task.
