Data Center Migrations – Why Get Help Early??
You’re a Senior Tech Executive doing your planning for the upcoming year(s). Over the last year and a half your company has experienced explosive organic growth, made two small acquisitions and additional growth is definitely on the horizon. It’s been a crazy 18 months and based on all the projections, things will not be slowing down. Your technology infrastructure footprint has grown quickly and you’ve been able to stay ahead of everything; keeping business, technology and program requirements in alignment. But….
Being a forward-thinking Executive, you realize there is only so much more that can be done with your current facility. There are optimizations that should be addressed. In order to allow the business to continue to grow and for your organization to maintain the level of support required, you have some expansion decisions to make.
First and foremost is the physical environment housing the infrastructure. Can it be expanded? Has it reached its limits? Do rising power costs keep you up at night? There are physical/structural, environmental, technical and financial considerations to take into account. Do I stay or do I go?
After that, you have the infrastructure itself to consider. Has it been regularly refreshed? Is it nearing end of life? Is there an old technology in the mix that has been a workhorse for years but really needs to be done a different way? What about your network? Your address space? When you finalize your approach on your facility, can the network be extended? Will you need new IP addresses? The network is your backbone so it is critical that this foundation be done in a way that allows a seamless transition but also allows for future expansion.
Then you have applications and storage. Do you have candidates for the cloud? Do you lose control going to the cloud? Will performance take a hit? Do you have adequate storage or will you need to expand this? Are you aware of all your application interdependencies? Quite a bit of time will need to be spent in this area. After ensuring you have a comprehensive and solid inventory; knowing all of your interdependencies, both internal as well as external, is key to success.
As you work through all of this there’s something else to keep in mind. There are multiple paths or methodologies for a Data Center Migration. How will you execute in the end?
· You might be considering a complete shutdown of your environment. This means the business will need to take an outage. Is this feasible? If yes, great! If no, then what about a failover to a DR environment? Has this been regularly and successfully tested?
· Will you do a partial outage instead? Reducing compute capacity while you move, but the business stays up? This means multiple phases?
· How about a virtual migration? A viable option, but one that will involve setting up some new equipment and moving over the wire.
· Maybe a cloud migration for some of your environment and physical for other parts?
As you see there are many decisions that need to be considered and made. Do you and your staff have time to evaluate all of the potential options yet still focus on keeping the business running on all cylinders? Working with a partner that has extensive experience helping clients with these considerations/decisions and ultimately executing a seamless migration for you is an absolute must.
If any of this resonates with you, be assured there is help available. Cumulus Solutions Group will be happy to review your current situation and discuss our ability to assist you as you embark on a very high profile and extremely important path. Contact us today!!
Blog Author
Mark Vieira, Co Founder & Managing Partner
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