How do I decommission a data center? A new infrastructure for avenit AG.

A New Infrastructure for avenit AG—The Starting Point!

The avenit AG is a digital agency based in Offenburg with approximately 70 employees that, in the past, hosted its clients in a dedicated area within a data center in Karlsruhe.

For a long time, the advantages of having its own infrastructure outweighed the disadvantages. However, over time, operating and maintaining its own data center ties up many valuable resources that could be put to much better use elsewhere in client projects.

At the same time, the hosting market has evolved rapidly in recent years, and eventually the costs of operation and maintenance exceed the benefits—especially when critical hardware reaches the end of its lifespan and major investments in new hardware are on the horizon.

This is exactly where avenit AG found itself, and it decided to discontinue the operation and maintenance of its own data center. This decision raised a number of questions:

• Who will take over the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure in the future?
• Are there providers with experience in managing a data center and migrating existing customers?
• Who can reliably take over operations and maintenance and offer a high level of service, including SLAs?
• What is the best architecture for our own development workflow?
• Who understands how agencies work and can also implement individual client requests?
• Can I plan and further develop my infrastructure in the long term with the new hosting provider?
• Is the offer cost-effective and in the client’s best interest in terms of stability, performance, and security?

Armed with these and many other detailed questions, avenit AG set out to find a new hosting provider.

Shutting down your own data center? No problem—we know what we’re doing!

During the initial discussions with avenit AG, punkt.de GmbH quickly made a strong impression with its infrastructure team of DevOps and infrastructure specialists. Since we had just shut down our own data center and knew exactly where avenit AG was facing challenges and what concerns arise when migrating infrastructure, we were able to develop a highly targeted plan and build trust.

As an established hosting providerwith whom avenit AG can make long-term plans, and with our own team that handles hosting and infrastructure—thereby ensuring not only a high service level but also SLAs for avenit AG’s customers, avenit AG gains a partner that is also capable of implementing its own customers’ individual infrastructure requirements.

The new infrastructure—servers, monitoring, firewall, backup, network, Rackspace

Following an initial workshop with the infrastructure specialists at punkt.de GmbH, we determined what hardware is needed to gradually migrate existing customers to the new servers. A brief overview of the most important components can be found here:

Servers:

For the migration of existing customers, we initially planned for 6 dedicated proServer L servers with AMD Ryzen 9 processors, which are housed in a physical rack at Hetzner Online GmbH .

We have been working very successfully with Hetzner in this area for our customers for many years. This allows us to rely on reliable, high-quality hardware and be confident that the servers are located in Germany, meet all GDPR requirements, and are subject to German law.

Monitoring:

Monitoring is based on Zabbix and runs on a dedicated VM in the Hetzner Cloud. The monitoring system is continuously expanded and optimized in consultation with avenit AG.

Firewall:

For years, we have relied on the OPNsensefor years. To increase reliability, we use two servers for this purpose. We naturally handle the setup, configuration, and training for avenit AG.

Backup:

By default, we offer 7-day backups for our proServer, but we recommend using a dedicated backup server to provide up to 14 days of backups. There are no limits here; off-site or multiple backup locations are also possible.

Network:

For maximum performance, each server requires two networks (client, firewall, backup) and, of course, a subnet for IPv6 as well as a private network. For all customers who still rely on IPv4, we have, of course, also found a solution with avenit AG.

Rackspace Reservation:

To ensure that rack space does not become a limiting factor for avenit AG’s growth, we have arranged a reservation for additional server capacity in the rack at Hetzner. Long-term coordination regarding the further development and expansion of capacity is an integral part of the concept.