my company (of which I'm the IT department of 1) is moving from Northfield to the CME building and I'm trying to coordinate a bunch of stuff

Hello.

we have an ancient phone system which I'm assessing whether or not we want to move with it

Hmmm, Northfield. What firm is this?

i'm also noticing that the "internet" situation gets quite a bit more complicated than our basic Comcast Business cable when we move downtown

I know the CME and CBOT building well, as well as options in the area

k. So small office. You need help with the migration.

we're about 35 people

well, how can I assist?

we've got a company set for the actual structured cabling and probably for the actual gruntwork of moving the equipment, but beyond that i'm looking for a bit of guidance on how to proceed. what are my major concerns? i've never been involved in an office move.

i'll also need technical help over the weekend of the move

how much equipment are you moving?

3 racks

server footprint, etc.

Has the new space been built-out?

it's actually not 3 full racks by any means since the patch panels and things like that are obviously staying put

it's about 1 rack of actual servers

we'll call it 10 servers, but it depends on how quickly i can get some old ones retired/virtualized

all Microsoft stack?

Any Linux?

all Microsoft

(poop)

any virtualization in the mix?

lol, i know you're not an MS guy

I do enough of it, actually.

i run two clustered Hyper-V servers with a Fujitsu SAN

they're not bleeding edge or highly performant, but they do the trick for us

Oh, that's a combo I've never seen

we're supporting basics. Email, Office, Internet, little else

and for networking?

Cisco?

HP?

currently crap, but I'm moving towards HP

any Linksys switches in our environment will not be migrated

I guess my HP pricing leverage won't matter here :)

well, we used to buy our gear at CDW for obvious reasons, but in the last couple years that's changed

!

we used to get it basically at cost, but i've been told not to use them as a supplier anymore

personal politics

I have a great resource then.

(lower cost as well)

so there are a few things to plan. I help customer move and build out new locations

at times i feel like i'm overestimating the complexity of what needs to be done, but then i remind myself that i am one man and that i need to have everything planned out to the finest detail if it's going to work

Phones, structured cabling, networking, POWER, cooling.

getting comms in line...

email, DNS, running systems in parallel... the move...

outage windows.

whether to duplicate certain things...

are there resources/books/anything that help gameplan these things?

to be clear, i'm not trying to pump you for free information, i'm just trying to get a high-level overview of what i'm doing, so thanks for everything thus far

in your case, I'd get networking and firewall and new network going.

Um..

it's experience.

I'm a consultant... so I think of the questions because I've been through 30 or so facility moves

my general plan is to have the new network built-out and functional about 4 weeks prior to move

they've told me this is reasonable to expect

i'll have basically an entire weekend for the cutover

this is one of those things where I think it's better to contract a resource to help you through the process.

what do those contracts look like?

For someone like me, it's just time.

$200/hr.

so... I'd survey what you have now... whats at the new site. Make equipment recommendations.

and while i'm sure the answer is "it varies widely", how much time do you usually spend on an engagement like this?

leverage my ISP and Telecom vendors

I dunno... I had a customer move two blocks between River North offices... I manage their entire co-location footprint, so all they needed to do was phones, internet and cabling... They opted not to use me for the transition... but for their setup, it would have been 12-16 hours of my time

(also scroll up and delete the private bit)

A larger firm will cost more

how do i delete? i can't?

just "flag it"

lol, my bluetooth mouse just quit on me, one sec

doesn't flagging it just mark it for someone to read it?

a moderator

they'll delete it

so, "flag for moderate" not "flag for spam"

anyway, the key for me is to figure out how to utitilize a higher-priced resource such as yourself properly

i'd hate to engage and then have you show up to help me plug in network cables

You've attracted the attention of a moderator. What seems to be the problem?

i'll do a bit of an analysis myself and see if i can't come up with a clearer picture of my needs

@Richard Oh, just delete that bit earlier

sorry Richard, i put a bunch of private info in this chat that should probably be deleted

are these rooms private or no? i'm confused by them

@pk. I do what I need to do... even if it means plugging in cables

not private...

Google-indexed

(hence Slack)

i'm sure you'd do it, but i don't want to pay for that type of thing :)

OK. Looks like they're sorted.

thanks @Richard

thanks

@pk. I don't have time to waste on that either.

So I will use my time wisely to get the end result

so really, it starts with surveys... and then engaging the building and ISP options

It was nothing.

CME building is on-net with many providers... so I'd recommend a pair of ISPs

i think the thing that might end up being most helpful is examining our network architecture and improving on that

yeah, it's a chance to refactor that

i'm talking to a company right now that claims that they'll get me a ton of quotes for service in that building, so that area may be covered. but i'd like to take advantage of the move to build things out "right"

that might be where i snag you.

I'd pretty much just go with Cogent and another diverse carrier.

so, I worked in the financial trading industry in Chicago for awhile...

so the issues that come with those buildings are that you need to have two delivery methods for your internet connectivity (assuming an outage costs $)

you know, an outage doesn't cost us that much money

we're actually pretty happy with Comcast Business cable for the purposes of cheap bandwidth

Cogent is cheap, high-bandwidth fiber that's easily available in most parts of downtown... 100Mbps should be $1k/mo.

we need a PRI for our phone system likely, but that's another thing

100 Mbps symmetric?

you can also add Comcast if you want... depending on delivery method.

yes

fiber is always symmetric, no?

ok

Gigabit isn't too costly either

interesting, i'd like to increase our upstream bandwidth because we continue to move to the cloud

do you have a firewall now?

got a couple site-to-site VPNs to Azure private networks

we do, SonicWALL NSA2400 which will be not be moving with us since it'll be in place as a site-to-site VPN link

i like the SonicWALLs overall, so we may stick with another

:(

lol, where should be going?

here's the thing -- i'm one man

although i believe there are better options, i KNOW SonicWALL and it takes very little effort for me to manage it

I work primarily with small businesses... produce companies

i'm happy switching too, but if it requires that i go get my CCIE, it's not happening now

and I use Cisco ASA firewalls everywhere.

Sonicwall has a pretty bad rep... but I understand why people use them

(I find them more complex to use, though!)

believe me, i see the shortcomings of them too

but at this point, the devil i know is less scary than the devil i don't

So the Cisco ASA is rock solid and cheap.

i'm trying to be mindful of not doing an full stack switch during this move so that i can be nimble and quick when responding to issues

these won't be the source of your issues.

$500 Cisco ASA 5505 for the River North firm I mentioned

we do use the gateway malware/virus protection on it too...

I'd split that off

You know... each device doing the best it can... serving its purpose

:)

the linux way, in hardware form

I use Barracuda devices... mainly because they're easy for my customers to manage

But what is the phone system situation?

VoIP?

Avaya IP Office 406 with two IP 400 switches, PRI

want to keep it, right?

we don't love it, but we have a hard time justifying more

i'm torn on this issue

it's mad cheap, we own it, only pay for PRI monthly

Shoretel, Digium, Asterisk...

and get a SIP connection from ISP

that said, the hardware sucks. handsets have terrible speakerphone quality

it's been end-of-life for ages

runs on Win 2003

i hate these things about it

so at the very least i need to look into whether or not we can upgrade it

i've been told that SIP isn't as cost-effective due to some device that you have to have out front to protect it?

didn't make sense to me at the time

I'd replace. At most financial firms I've worked with, we went with vendor supported Asterisk solutions

Digium is easy

I've had success with it in 5 companies

Shoretel is used by a lot of my produce firms... but they're more like call centers.

the key is, would you recommend it for a one-man shop?

i want to spend almost 0 time on this system

beyond setting up new users, it should be hands off

by going to a smarter switch solution and thinking about your cabling... (look at HP 5400zl switches) You'll get PoE to all ports

Why HP? Lifetime warranty on networking gear.

the switch is a datacenter design and is flexible for data, voice, security, etc.

For the phones... there's initial setup... and then user management

latest switches i bought were HP 2920-48G, useful going forward?

the vendors are happy to work with it

i'm dumping all my Netgear/Linksys crap

2920's are fine... but I always go chassis when I can

they're cheaper (with my pricing)

interesting

i'm trying to think of the best way to engage you going forward. i'm considering having you out for a walkthrough of our environment so that we can spitball some ideas and then perhaps you can more formally make some recommendations as to how to proceed with the move.

i want to get the lowest hanging fruit

think it over. My contact email is on my profile... or linked in

what is the move date?

it'd kill me to move into new space and realize that i'd missed an opportunity

June likely

thanks for you time

[email protected] - Send a quick email

i will. i'm at [email protected], fyi

Ah, Marlene...

now I recall :)

yup :)

do i have to delete this room?

nope

you can just close it

ok