Know your app when migrating your data

One of the projects that I’m working on at the moment is moving a data center from being hosted in Dallas Texas up to New Jersey so that it’s closer to the companies corporate office in New York City.  As a part of this data center migration the Microsoft SQL Server databases must be moved to the new data center (dugh).  The company who’s data is being moved is a medical billing company, and their system is pretty busy, most of the time.  However at night the systems aren’t all that busy and on the weekends there is next to nothing going on.

I bring this up because moving 13 Gigs worth of transaction log files per day isn’t exactly something which can be done all that quickly, during the week.  However when I look at the transaction log backups for a Sunday each of the log backups for the largest database are just a few megs every 12 minutes where those same log backups during the day are hundreds of megs in size (or larger) every 12 minutes.

By waiting to do the data transfer of the full backups from Wednesday until Sunday I reduced the amount of data in the initial transaction log transfer by about 5 Gigs, for just this one database.  As the data is transferring at about 5mbits per second that’s a decent amount of time savings per database (there’s about 40 databases which have to be moved as a part of this solution).

This just goes to show that with a little knowledge of the systems that you are working with you can save yourself a decent amount of time.

Denny

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