After months of planning, infrastructure deployment, testing, and customer migrations, ERP Suites is near the completion of its move out of the Cincinnati data center.
All production customer workloads have now been successfully migrated out of the Cincinnati data center and are running from either the new Minneapolis data center or the existing Denver facility. With customer production migrations complete, ERP Suites is now focused on moving the remaining non-customer workloads, with the full transition expected to be completed by November 1, 2026.
But the project has involved much more than moving workloads from one location to another. It has given ERP Suites an opportunity to refresh the infrastructure supporting its private cloud hosting environment, rethink how that infrastructure is maintained, and build a stronger foundation for the future.
Why ERP Suites Moved Out of the Cincinnati Data Center
Cincinnati has been home to ERP Suites’ data center since the company opened its doors 20 years ago. As ERP Suites looked toward the next chapter of its hosting operations, it was time to consider what the next generation of that infrastructure should look like.
ERP Suites chose to move to Flexential’s Minneapolis data center, expanding a relationship already established through its Denver hosting environment. The move provided an opportunity to transition to a next-generation co-located facility while investing in the infrastructure needed to support customers well into the future.
The Scale Behind the Cincinnati Data Center Migration
Moving out of Cincinnati required coordinating far more than a change of physical location.
Approximately 25 hosted production customers were moved out of the Cincinnati data center. Across the broader project, nearly 2,500 virtual machines were involved, including both customer systems and ERP Suites infrastructure used to support and manage the hosting environment. The IBM i side of the migration included approximately 50 LPARs.
Each customer migration also required its own planning.
ERP Suites began with a template migration plan designed to identify the applications, technologies, responsibilities, dependencies, and testing requirements that needed to be addressed. Service Delivery Managers then worked with individual customer teams to apply that framework to their specific environments.
The objective wasn’t just to confirm that infrastructure had moved. It was to make sure the business functions customers depended on in Cincinnati would work as expected once their environments were running from the new location. That meant accounting for ranging from application testing and ownership to firewall rules, DNS, networking, and virtual IP configurations.
Much of that work had to happen outside the normal workweek. The infrastructure team worked more than 20 weekends over the course of the project, typically migrating one customer at a time. Early migrations took approximately eight hours from start through final validation. As the team refined the process and optimized virtual machine migrations, later cutovers dropped to approximately four hours.
More Than a Data Center Move
Despite the scale of the migration, relatively little equipment was physically transported from Cincinnati to Minneapolis.
Only about 10% of the hardware was physically moved. Instead, ERP Suites used the transition as an opportunity to rearchitect the Minneapolis environment and refresh the infrastructure supporting its hosting operations. Roughly 90% of the equipment in Minneapolis is new.
That distinction is important. The project wasn’t simply about recreating the Cincinnati environment in another city.
ERP Suites built out new storage, networking, and compute infrastructure in Minneapolis while also moving to newer versions of foundational hardware and software. In many ways, the project became a broader technology refresh across the hosting environment.
Keeping technology current helps address underlying weaknesses that can emerge as infrastructure ages while making the environment easier to support and maintain. The refresh also gives ERP Suites a newer foundation from which to support future growth rather than carrying aging infrastructure into the next stage of its hosting operations.
What the Minneapolis Data Center Means Going Forward
For customers, the value of the Minneapolis data center isn’t simply about having newer equipment or operating from a different location.
The large objective is a more stable, maintainable, and sustainable foundation for ERP Suites’ private cloud hosting environment.
While some customers may see performance improvements because of the new infrastructure, performance was not the primary reason for the project. The greater focus was foundational stability and positioning the environment for the future.
Moving to a co-located facility also changes where ERP Suites needs to dedicate its resources. With the foundational facility infrastructure managed by an established data center provider, ERP Suites can remain focused on the networking, compute, applications, and services its customers rely on.
What began as a need to address an aging data center ultimately became an opportunity to refresh much of the technology behind ERP Suites’ hosting environment. As the final workloads leave Cincinnati, the project closes one chapter of ERP Suites’ private cloud infrastructure while establishing the foundation for what’s next.
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