Best Practices For Planning A Data Center Migration Project

Leading a data center migration project is one of the most challenging IT projects for any organization to complete successfully. Spending time up front to engage the business, establish the project as a top priority, select the right approach, and carefully plan the project are important keys to success.

Today's Environment
Many organizations are finding that, for a variety of reasons, they need to migrate their core technology to a new location. After a new location is selected - which might be an expanded space in an existing facility, a new data center, or a colocation vendor - IT Leaders are faced with a critical decision. How do I migrate critical applications and infrastructure - often required 7x24 -without a significant disruption to the business? The answer will define the success of the IT organization and how the business perceives IT"s ability to support them.

Point B's Perspective
Data center migrations are inherently complex and risky for any organization. They are one of the most challenging projects an IT organization will ever undertake. Large software implementations may impact one or a few applications; data center migrations impact every application and every component of the infrastructure.

"Data center migrations are application-centric, not infrastructure-centric"
A common mistake IT leaders make is assuming that a data center migration is an infrastructure project - an effort that can be executed behind the scenes and "in the margins." The opposite is true. Migrations are application-centric efforts that require the full engagement of the application, infrastructure and business teams.

Consider the following: Sequencing a migration by server name or technology type will impact many applications and their business owners multiple times. To the business the outages will seem random and poorly planned. Conversely, grouping servers and technology by the business function and applications they serve impacts a business unit only once.

"A successful data center migration is 95% preparation and 5% execution."
A typical migration of a moderately sized data center takes 9 - 18 months to plan and execute. The execution phase of a well-planned migration may take only a few hours, but the effort required to plan, build, test, communicate, mitigate risks, and prepare the business can take months.

Start with a clear, well developed strategy by engaging the infrastructure, applications, and business teams in the planning. Understand your scope and the preferred approaches that produce the composite profile of duration, cost, and risk.

Key to mitigating risk is extraordinary attention to detail and a clearly-defined, repeatable process. The specific migration option for each application and each associated piece of hardware should be carefully considered. While it can be tempting to shortchange the early planning effort, in-depth planning inevitably pays for itself over the course of the project in reduced risk, downtime and stress, and streamlined, efficient production customers.

The results of a poorly planned and executed data center migration may have devastating effects: grossly extended or unplanned interruptions to critical services, lost productivity, unrecoverable data, lost revenue, or worse.

"A data center migration cannot be executed 'in the margins'"
The scope, complexity, risk, and cost of a data center migration demand that it be executed as a formal project and ranked as the top priority of both the business and IT. In prioritizing the migration with other business objectives, IT organizations can successfully manage the high resource demand and mitigate the risk of burning out critical personnel.

The Bottom Line
"Experienced leadership is the defining factor for success"
Data center migration projects call for specialized and regularly exercised data center migration experience, sophisticated project leadership skills, and an innate ability to ascertain business and technology requirements. Most IT organizations have the technical capability to produce and execute the necessary technical designs, but lack the experience and leadership required to execute the planning phase and navigate the inevitable landmine issues.

Organizing the business, application, and infrastructure leadership into a cohesive team can turn the most challenging implementation a business may ever experience into an example of success that defines the capabilities of the IT organization.