Summary

  • Richard Jimmerson’s August 2025 memo to ARIN’s Board described a move from the Chantilly office computer room to an external data center. Circuits were live, equipment installed, and the new site under test as services began migrating.
  • ARIN later reported the move complete and on budget. Its executives clarified that the core systems now run on ARIN’s physical equipment in a commercial facility, while selected other services can use cloud capacity.

The shortest commute had a long risk list

For years, ARIN’s servers lived in the office. A coffee run and a visit to the data center could share a corridor. That convenience also made the building’s power, cooling and physical environment part of the operating story for a registry that other networks consult every day.

In a 12 August 2025 memo to the Board, Chief Operating Officer Richard Jimmerson set out a move from the Chantilly office to an external hosting site. The work had four beats: choose and contract a site, order and connect circuits and hardware, move the gear, then scale the old office installation down to what local staff needed. By August, the site was contracted, circuits activated, equipment racked and connected, and the new location in testing. Services were moving with a Q4 finish in view. This reads like a removals list because resilience often does.

The 2025 ARIN annual report says engineering completed the multiyear move. At ARIN 57 in April 2026, the financial presentation called the project in service and on budget. The engineering update described new network, server and storage hardware and relief from maintaining office HVAC certifications. It named higher availability as a goal and listed hosted Kubernetes work as ongoing. Those are ARIN’s reported steps and objectives; the published material supplies no before-and-after uptime series to turn them into a performance victory lap.

There was one more clarification worth keeping. In the ARIN 57 technical discussion, President and CEO John Curran said the move put ARIN’s physical systems in a professional commercial data center. Core infrastructure had not moved into a cloud provider’s platform. ARIN still uses cloud services selectively, but its registry machines kept a more direct custody chain. The label “data center migration” can hide that architectural choice; Curran made it audible.

Jimmerson’s memo and the later completion record tell a measured story about operational control. The registry moved the environmental burden out of an office building and into a site built for it. It kept its own systems to run. No public record here proves a particular service survived a fault that would once have taken it down. The practical achievement on record is narrower and solid: the equipment left the office, the service migration finished, and the project stayed within its approved budget. ARIN’s staff directory identifies Jimmerson as Chief Operating Officer; its speaker roster names him and supplies the public headshot used to ground this article’s editorial portrait.