Weapons: Data Center Migration Beware of Four Big Mistakes

Migrating a data center is a major task for most organizations. A successful migration is a resume process for any IT professional. A successful migration will demonstrate skills in large-scale project planning, project management, technology integration, and personnel interaction. This process provides an opportunity to expose the state of the entire company, as IT organizations (due to the impact of data center migration) will reach out to each department in some way.

However, data center migration may have a career failure. Because data center migration does not result in disruption of mission-critical business processes, there are cases of lost orders, missed deadlines, and customer dissatisfaction. No IT professional is willing to receive a memo on this matter and participate in a discussion explaining these issues.

In most migration projects, there are four important mistakes to avoid: ignoring data, mixing migration projects with other projects, not having proper planning, and not creating devices, applications, and process catalogs. Taking advantage of some of the time in advance to consider each of these issues will significantly increase your chances of success. Your personal profile will then increase significantly.

Ignore Data

While IT professionals will consider many of the infrastructure issues associated with data center relocation, migrating data itself is a laborious task and sometimes more cumbersome. Since many companies adopt a model in which business leaders have data, it is easy to see unseen data. The marketing department has a database of potential users. The operations department has inventory data and so on. However, the reality is that the data and the infrastructure underneath it must be seen as part of an interconnected overall system, rather than components that can be taken away and assembled at will.

Smart IT professionals will contact business owners prior to migration to identify potentially affected information and sign an agreement on data access, new system compatibility, application migration and more. It is worthwhile to clean up the data before migration, but never clean up the data during the migration process.

Mixing Migration with Other Projects

Since all programs boil down to migrating a data center, many professionals try to incorporate other projects into this data center relocation project. This is usually done under the guidance of the CFO's cost savings.

This is perhaps the biggest mistake a company can make. One of our customers recently tried to combine multiple projects into a common data center migration plan, which ultimately led to the project being too complex and the results were not completed on schedule. The company suffered a huge fine because it could not vacate the old facilities on time.

Migrating a data center is a big project in itself. This is not the time to adopt new technologies such as computing environment virtualization or tiered storage. First migrate your data center. If your operations and finance teams insist on combining with other projects, and your vendor or reseller to study the quotations for implementing these projects in sequence, these costs should not be too high. Finally, calculate the potential cost of increasing the complexity of mixing projects together. An additional one month's rent or a penalty that is not vacated may offset the savings that would be expected to save the project together.

Incomplete Planning

Some IT professionals don't take the time or effort to prepare a comprehensive plan or prepare a comprehensive documentation for their existing data center environment. They either can't remember which applications are running on which servers, or make erroneous judgments about devices that may or may not be used. Relying on memory does not actually guarantee proper migration of critical servers or applications.

Smart project managers take an integrated approach to planning, not only to develop a baseline "best case" plan to accomplish this project goal, but also to use a large amount of upfront time to develop a risk management plan. Most failures are due to lack of predictability, and no one thinks of a disaster that will affect your data center migration. Therefore, you have no plans to deal with disasters.

Take some time to bring together the heads of various business units and your IT team. Find out some of the worst things that might happen during your data migration. When you think you have found all of these situations, consider more. Evaluate the likelihood and potential business impact of each situation and develop a contingency plan. Disasters may not happen, but if disaster strikes, you will be better prepared.

Forget to create a comprehensive catalog

Any competent IT professional will develop a strong project plan with plenty of time. This is self-evident. However, before you start the migration, don't forget to develop a comprehensive directory listing of everything from servers, applications, network connections, storage arrays, and your data center. Work with the head of the business unit throughout the company to ensure that your directory listing is not missing. Before planning a new data center, be sure to have a detailed list of everything in the existing data center.

Slacking or unprepared when migrating data can have catastrophic consequences. Companies have high hopes for improved performance in new infrastructure environments, and data quality can be affected if they are quickly migrated without adequate preparation. In the best case, important data is likely not available for the time being. In the most severe cases, records may be lost forever. For companies that increasingly rely on data, the consequences may include customers abandoning shopping carts, immediate loss of sales, and even long-term impact on customer relationships and company reputation.

As you invest in hardware and build projects, carefully plan your migration data. Make sure you work with data owners across the enterprise. By following these recommendations, you will look forward to moving more often.