Closing the door on legacy problems

Shared Services Canada (SSC) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) have closed the door of an old data centre in Ottawa for the last time. In doing so, they made the Government of Canada’s (GC) data both safer and greener.

Legacy problems

“There is no scenario where a small department hosting their servers in a server room can compete with SSC in terms of greening, resilience or redundancy.”

The data centre on Booth Street in Ottawa was a key facility for NRCan. For years, it housed data and applications that helped Canadians prepare for natural disasters like floods, wildfires and earthquakes.

But as with other legacy data centres that SSC inherited when it was created in 2011, the Booth Street facility wasn’t built to support today’s rapidly changing digital landscape. Maintaining these aging facilities accrues significant technical debt for the GC. Even with ongoing maintenance and upgrades, legacy data centres continue to come up against operational challenges like keeping the servers cool enough, even during the winter.

“The servers were failing because they were overheating,” says NRCan Chief Information Officer Pierre Pelletier. “We needed a home for those servers that was a little more resilient and reliable.”

The Booth Street data centre itself was also nearing capacity, meaning that even with upgrades, the facility wouldn’t be able to house NRCan’s growing critical data needs.

But where could the data go? Future workloads needed to find a new home.

Efficient and sustainable solutions

“For services that are predictable, there’s nothing as resilient and reliable as an enterprise data centre that SSC operates.”

Under the GC’s 2024 Application Hosting Strategy, SSC is at the centre of all GC application hosting operations. This includes operating 2 types of on-premise hosting solutions:

• legacy data centres – older facilities that serve individual departments or a cluster of departments
• enterprise data centres (EDCs) – modern, environmentally sustainable, reliable and secure facilities that serve the entire federal government and are designed to eliminate the need for planned maintenance shutdowns

One of SSC’s EDCs received Tier III Gold certification from Uptime Institute for exceptional operations and maintenance standards.

Hosting solutions like EDCs are a key component of the hybrid hosting model that supports the Application Hosting Strategy. EDCs are important for the GC to be able to offer digital services and programs to Canadians. Being more efficient and sustainable, they are also key to SSC delivering on the Departmental Sustainable Development Strategy 2023-2027 and the Greening Government Strategy.

We use innovative technologies at our EDCs to reduce their environmental impact, especially when it comes to managing heat—a problem at NRCan’s Booth Street facility. Of the 4 EDCs, 2 of them have large cooling wheels that take advantage of Canada’s climate to bring in cold air from outside and push out the hot air from inside. Additionally, all of our EDCs capture and use rainwater for building system needs.

In fact, SSC’s EDCs have all met a minimum Silver LEED© rating. LEED is a global green building certification program that recognizes leadership in environmentally sustainable design.

So how does SSC move a partner’s data out of legacy and into one of these more reliable, secure and green hosting solutions?

SSC and NRCan working together

SSC works with GC departments to reduce the number of necessary business applications in legacy hosting environments and then migrate (or move) those applications and their data to more modern, secure and stable hosting solutions, either in the cloud or in a GC-owned EDC. Where an application and its data reside is based on the type of application and the ways a department has to access it.

Since not all migrations can happen at once, SSC prioritizes these moves based on:

• the number of critical and high-priority incidents affecting service availability
• the reliability of the legacy data centre and the percentage of infrastructure that has reached its end of life
• the presence of Critical Business Applications and Services (CBAS)

Because these migrations take time, SSC and the migrating department put in place a plan to preserve the functionality, performance, security and integrity of applications and data. In the end, users (like Canadians) should never see any interruption in service resulting from these migrations.

For the Booth Street migration, SSC and NRCan established a high-availability dual network path solution. This meant creating 2 separate data paths between the Booth Street Data Centre and the EDC, ensuring there was a backup if one path went down.

In short, NRCan’s data would be available to Canadians throughout all parts of this move.

The 2 departments also set up system monitoring, incident management, change management and help desk processes to minimize any potential disruption.

On December 15, 2023, SSC and NRCan began the transfer, moving 439 virtual machines and 58 physical servers from legacy to enterprise data centres.

But did it work, and was it worth it?

Measurable success

“From a communication, planning, execution and results perspective, this project should be reviewed as a case study on how to run infrastructure migration activities.”

SSC and NRCan have now had time to evaluate the migration and have already seen the following benefits:

• Availability: prevented an average of 20 critical incidents per year and eliminated the need for 1-2 days of maintenance shutdowns
• Infrastructure: saved more than $55 million in net run costs by decommissioning physical and virtual servers
• Real property: reclaimed $31.6 million in real property space

Yes, it worked. And yes, it was worth it.

“With the engagement I have from my colleagues at SSC and the improvement overall on service capability, I’m very happy with the migration,” says Pelletier.

Forward together

In 2011, SSC inherited 720 legacy data centres like Booth Street—old, expensive facilities that could no longer support modern applications. SSC has now reached a major milestone—it has closed more than 500 of those original data centres.

These successes are now allowing us to shift our focus and once again plan for the evolving digital future.

During his keynote address at the 2024 FWD50 conference, SSC President Scott Jones shared his vision of the future, telling the audience, “Some legacy data centres will remain open for various reasons, such as a partner needing their data to be based in a specific location. And that’s okay. Our focus is on optimizing infrastructure and rationalizing applications to the appropriate hosting platform to provide the GC with industry-aligned, world-class hosting options.”

“We’re steering toward a future that not only lasts but thrives, fortified by diligent oversight, savvy cost management and a robust financial strategy.”

In the meantime, Canadians can rest assured that NRCan’s data and applications will continue to be available to them, whether they are preparing for floods, wildfires or earthquakes, or researching how climate change is impacting Canada’s forests.