SWAN Member Library Staff:

The SWAN IT Team is excited to officially announce the next hardware migration for the SWAN server infrastructure.

Since March of 2017, my team and I have attended trainings, researched, and tested four potential options to upgrade our ageing server infrastructure. After much consideration, we ultimately determined that a migration to Microsoft Azure Cloud Services would be the best option to provide the financial and performance flexibility that SWAN needs to accommodate the continued growth of our membership. A whitepaper describing our findings was posted to the December 19^th SWAN Board packet. That whitepaper is available for reference at the link below.

https://support.swanlibraries.net/system/files/Public/SWANTech/Recommendation_on_SWAN_Servers_2017-12-11a.pdf

Today marks the first major milestone in the Azure migration as our Symphony Test server is migrated from the RAILS datacenter to the SWAN Azure environment while being simultaneously upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. This test migration will allow SWAN staff to evaluate the new Azure infrastructure and identify issues prior to our Production server migration.

Our next milestone in this project is scheduled for February 20^th when SWAN’s Symphony Production server is upgraded to the latest Red Hat Enterprise version while remaining in the RAILS datacenter. Following the success of this upgrade, a full move to the Azure environment has been tentatively scheduled for either the first week of July or the first week of September. As this project runs parallel to the New 19 migration, we’ve carefully scheduled these dates to mitigate any possible impact to the New 19 migration, and to ensure the optimal performance and minimal downtime for the SWAN Membership throughout the process.

In the upcoming weeks, watch for further details on the SWAN server infrastructure project including any anticipated downtime and how your library might need to prepare for the migration.

Please feel free to email me should you have any questions about the project.

Thank you,

Steven Schlewitt
Information Technology Manager
steven@swanlibraries.net • 630-326-5993

SWAN Library Services
800 Quail Ridge Drive, Westmont, IL 60559
swanlibraries.net • catalog.swanlibraries.net