A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter

Visiting a second bar on the same night can often be a dangerous move.

When Dave Bradley did it, he ended up having to move a datacenter, on a two-week deadline, without extra budget.

Bradley is a senior cloud engineer at healthcare services company Vizient and visited a bar while winding down after an off-site company meeting.

After enjoying a decent stint of merriment with colleagues from the company’s tech team, Bradley decided to call it a night - but on his way out, he spotted his boss in a second watering hole, conversing with other even more senior execs.

He decided to stop in and stayed a while before the second group decided their night was over.

As Bradley walked out, one of the senior suits asked, “Could we shut down the Chicago datacenter in two weeks and get everything moved down to Dallas?” Bradley’s reaction was “What?” Then his boss intervened and asked if it was possible.

Helped by some top shelf liquor, Bradley and a colleague from the networking team started to brainstorm the project.

Management didn’t hold Bradley to the two-week timeframe, but settled on a demanding six-to-seven-month target.

Speaking at the VMware Explore conference on Monday, Bradley said Vizient used Pure Storage (now Everpure) arrays and had 10Gbps links between the two datacenters.

Replicating data between arrays was the obvious move, and the company had sufficient bandwidth to make it happen.

Of course it wasn’t that easy.

The two datacenters had different IP addressing schemes, and the company didn’t have enough hardware to support all workloads during the downtime that a physical hardware migration would cause.

Magic tricks In one meeting, Bradley says execs told him “Just make it work.

You guys are good.