Infra Matters:Who moved my datacenter?

Datacenter Migrations are critical activities for a reason - so much needs to be considered and so much can easily go wrong.

A lot of planning goes into the planning phase itself! Starting with why and where we are moving our datacenters. Many factors like growth, performance, legacy resources, operational cost, green initiatives, real estate change and staffing have a bearing on Datacenter migration. Understanding the reasons for the migration will help us prepare the right migration plan.

For instance, are we looking to relocate / re-build or just replicate our present conventional data center? Do we need cloud based services? Is a hardware refresh included or just virtualization?

These are critical questions to be answered during the planning phase. Depending on the objective of the migration, datacenter relocation, replication or rebuild are three options to be considered:

Relocating a Datacenter:
Servers with less critical applications, which can tolerate longer outage during migration are lifted from the existing datacenter and shifted to the new datacenter. It involves de-commissioning the server in the source data center, transporting and installing exactly the same server in the new facility. Before performing this, the image gets captured to prevent any data loss.

Replicating a data center:
Replication would be a chosen option in a scenario where, the target datacenters will be equipped with identical hardware and OS as that of the source datacenter - resulting in a complete replication of the environment. Replication will either be a P2P (Physical to Physical) or P2V (Physical to Virtual)

Re-building Datacenters:
As the name indicates, this option will require re-building the target data center from ground up. It may involve procuring new hardware, OS and even re-writing the applications to suit the new environment. This option could be time consuming, depending on the complexity of the environment.

Once a choice is made, it will define the type of resources and planning required.
Poorly planned or executed migration can lead to unexpected outages leading to revenue and reliability losses.