Avoiding Stragglers During Your Next Data Center Migration
Table of Contents
The time will come when every company must upgrade its data center infrastructure. Sometimes, it isn’t as simple as upgrading a few outdated devices – but recently, companies are deciding that a complete data center migration is needed. The drivers may be space, cooling, power, aging facilities or simply cost savings. A company may also have a desire to move services to the cloud.
For IT managers, data center migration can be a scary event. “How will we coordinate with all the stakeholders?” “Will everything migrate successfully?” “How do I know if we’ve missed anything?” “What can I do to assure the company all the services on which it depends will not be impacted?” “How do we follow all the changes as they occur?” These are questions traditional ITAM and ITSM tools have trouble answering, but with Virima, leaders can approach data center migrations with cool, calm confidence.
Migration Scenarios
Data center migrations happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps, capacity is constrained, and you want to balance some load across sites. Maybe, you want to take advantage of new technology to increase your processing density or use power and other resources more efficiently. Regardless of the reason for the move, it is your job to ensure the migration occurs successfully, and with minimal disruption to the business.
Here are 4 of the most common data center migration scenarios for modern businesses:
- Upgrade from one physical data center to another.
- Cloud Migration from a physical data center to an IaaS or PaaS environment.
- Disaster recovery – failover and failback.
- Acquisition integration.
Each of these scenarios will have some slight nuances, but there are many elements of a data center migration process that are identical. You must understand what components are in the environment and their use. Also, you must identify what migrates and what is replaced. You must plan the timing and approach of the migration and devise an effective communication strategy. You must execute the move itself.
After migrating the technical components, the team must verify the services and thoroughly document everything. With these tasks completed, the old environment must be properly decommissioned.
Having the right tools to manage complexity
Performing these activities can be extremely difficult if you are relying on traditional discovery tools and reports generated from your ITSM system to guide you. A typical data center move is likely to include more than 10,000 configuration items and relationships. Processing such substantial data in text-based reports often leads to overlooking some items. A visual form of your configuration data can help make the analysis process easier and provide you with a wealth of insights as the migration process occurs.
- Confidently identify any potentially impacted service or system
- Inventory what components are live in an environment
- Track activity on devices to determine what is hot (being used) and what is cold (idle resources)
- Visualize dependencies to ensure services are “whole” and connected correctly
- Compare one environment to another to ensure services migrated successfully
- Easily identify all stakeholders the migration could impact
Your business stakeholders and the users of your IT systems are counting on your team to manage the data center migration and minimize impact to operations both during and after the move. Virima will help you by giving you the tools you need to see your infrastructure and components and how they are being used, so you can make informed migration decisions. When the migration is completed, Virima will help you verify no stragglers are present and all services are up and running – so you can declare success with confidence.
Every data center migration starts with a thorough data center discovery. Read Virima’s Discovery Best Practices white paper to learn what you must know before the planning can begin.
Summary
Data Migration Scenarios
Data center migrations happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps, capacity is constrained, and you want to balance some load across sites. Maybe, you want to take advantage of new technology to increase your processing density or use power and other resources more efficiently. Regardless of the reason for the move, it is your job to ensure the migration occurs successfully, and with minimal disruption to the business. Here are 4 of the most common data center migration scenarios for modern businesses: 1. Upgrade from one physical data center to another 2. Cloud Migration from a physical data center to an IaaS or PaaS environment 3. Disaster recovery – failover and failback 4. Acquisition integration.
