There are a number of reasons for an organization to relocate its data centre, although many believe incorrectly it can be executed in the same way as any other IT project.
Many IT projects involve Enterprise Architecture change management and/or building application delivery into a live environment. These are fundamentally different project delivery skillsets to a physical relocation of a data centre. Primarily because you are looking at separation, and assembly of the core functional hardware an entire business relies on for every aspect of their operation, rather than building isolated elements that slot into the overall business model.
The success of a data centre relocation requires patience, effort, meticulous planning, and the ability to tease out the complex dependencies among your applications.
Over the last decade I have assisted a number of organisations with relocating and/or refreshing their Data Centres. Typically involving both a production and disaster recovery occurrences with a reasonable physical distance between the two. Here are some tips and considerations that might be helpful to anyone whose organisation is contemplating a data centre relocation or is in the planning stages of one.
Most organisations look at relocation of a data centre because; they outgrew their current space; they’re ridding themselves of the burden of providing for the power, cooling, and other needs of a mission-critical computing environment; they want their servers to be in a hardened, more secure facility, hosted or owned; they merged, de-merged, or were bought by another company; they’re taking advantage of the cloud’s economies of scale.
Relocating a data centre is a significant challenge but often it is an appropriate choice for the business, whether for economic reasons or to enhance the company’s security and resiliency.
The old anecdote, Plan to Fail or Fail to Plan?
Like executing a real live Disaster Recovery scenario, a data centre relocation project is where you are gracefully bringing your systems down in one location and then gracefully bringing them up in another, whether it’s physical, in the cloud, or a combination. At the end of the day its success is all in the planning. Flicking the proverbial switch is of course just 1% of the project.
Moving the hardware is the straightforward part of a data centre migration. What’s hard, and complicated, is understanding the integration of and relationships among the hardware, software, applications, business processes, and impacts if certain portions are not immediately available.
Data Centre Relocation Flavours
These include: traditional (physical to physical with both sites being owned by the company or moving to a hosted data centre solution), cloud, and hybrid (with part of the data going to the cloud and part to newly relocated company servers).
Partial and full relocations to the cloud are becoming increasingly common. However, it doesn’t really remove the complexity of the project data centre relocation deliverables. It does however, provide for cost reduction opportunities through the procurement of infrastructure consumption models referred to as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). These outsourced models can be a double edged sward as your business becomes immersed in an external provider’s cost of delivery modelling over time.
“Hot Cutover” or “Phased”
A Hot Cutover happens all at once in a short period of time. Usually when you are relocating existing equipment and not refreshing your infrastructure at the same time. You shut everything down and then the specialist moving company comes, you ship your equipment to the new location, unpack it, set it up, and turn everything back on; hopefully it works. This is considered a high-risk approach depending on the age of the hardware being moved. Such a move might take place over a weekend or a week or two. This type of move is typically only feasible for smaller organisations, where there are only two to four racks of servers, storage, and network equipment. It’s also typically the most disruptive type of move. A phased move takes place in stages and can occur over the span weeks, months or a year or more depending on the magnitude of the project.
Risks to consider
Equipment can break in transit. Your machines might not start up at the new location. You might not have all the dependent hardware and equipment. Processing and application dependencies can be broken, causing business interruptions. Your networking and authentication processes might not be set up. Your allotted time might run out with things still not ready to go. Every single one of these can happen in a move. In fact, they can all happen in the same move—hence determining the interdependencies is a critical planning element.
Senior Management Support
The more senior management supports the data centre relocation, the more likely it is to go smoothly. Your company’s senior leadership can assist the move in many ways. One of the main ways is negotiating among the competing desires of different departments. This is commonly an issue in the timing of a relocation. Selecting a time for the move tends to be hard because it almost always happens that a time of year that works well for some departments is a serious inconvenience for others. If senior management is supportive and involved, they can be a great help in resolving impasses between business units.
Planning and More Planning
The planning phase for your data centre relocation is the most important stage of the project. This is where you should spend 90 percent of your time and effort.
A data centre relocation is not a job for the inexperienced, in any of its phases. Project managers can have all of the PM certificates in the world, and that certainly helps for some IT projects, but in reality, a successful project manager in data centre relocation are those who have a solid track record in what is a highly niche space. This type of project is for careful, patient, detail-oriented people who excel in areas like interdependencies, gap analysis, procurement and project team cohesion. The team cohesion is as critical as the other areas of planning because you will be working with these subject matter experts in an after-hours capacity, so those relationships need to be rock solid for the success of the project during cutover. The lead time for a data centre move is typically several months. For a big data centre, it might be from six months to a year.
Roles & Responsibilities
The most critical role in the data centre relocation is that of project manager. This should be a highly skilled individual who has experience in data centre moves. If you don’t have such a person on staff, you’ll need to obtain one as an outside consultant.
Businesses don’t always realise a data centre relocation is similar to a major construction project in its complexity. The project manager will function like a general contractor, supervising the work of many separate teams and (most likely) outside experts.
You might also have a number of sub-project managers; for example, someone with expertise in moving data to the cloud, if that’s part of your relocation. In smaller project teams these are often subject matter experts who will also execute those key elements.
Understand Business Needs and Environment
Some of the first things to consider are your project and business needs. Sometimes companies that are relocating their data centres take advantage of the opportunity to upgrade to new equipment. The organisation brings the system down on the old equipment then brings it up in the new location on new servers. Such equipment upgrades can be partial or entire and require careful planning and consideration. These are considered the lowest risk types of relocations because it allows rollback if a particular application or data migration isn’t immediately successful at cutover.
Based on project and business needs, you can then determine the best time to conduct the move. Try to identify the time that will cause the least disruption to the business. Usually weekends, and ideally a holiday weekend where you have additional time for contingency.
Planning for the move should start at a high level then grow more detailed, culminating in a checklist similar to that a pilot uses before take-off.
If you’re doing a phased approach, make sure you consider the networking, security, and authentication impacts of the relocation. Connectivity needs to be ensured, authentication needs to function, and the applications need to be able to talk to each other. Outside experts can and probably should help you with these assessments.
One of the areas in a phased cutover is the project element of data migration. The key areas to look for during planning is the tool used to move the data from one platform to another. If this element is overlooked, and not pre-tested it’s very easy to run into issues if the vendor storage platform you are moving from is different to the one you are moving to.
If you are delivering a data centre relocation to a refreshed environment using a phased approach for a business that has high security compliance requirements on the data being moved, you may also be looking at data encryption/de-encryption, and audit tracking logs to prove the data being moved is the same data at the destination storage for compliance measures. This usually entails a script to be built fit for purpose. As you firm up the overall timing, this assist in the move toward a more detailed level of planning.
Analyse when the networking needs to be in place, as well as network dual redundancy, geographical diversity and what servers need to be moved when, and all of the technical dependencies that need to be built out.
When the move starts, you should follow the checklist exactly. Decisions made on the fly with the goal of saving 15 minutes can have costly unforeseen consequences. Only depart from the checklist for a compelling reason.
External Supplier Assistance
In terms of third party help, the role of project manager is commonly filled by an outside person due to its critical nature and the specialised skill and experience required. This is typically when I have been engaged for this kind of project.
Most likely you should also bring in an outside company to move any hardware that needs to be transported. This should be a company that specialise in the moving of computer equipment, given the delicacy of such equipment and the importance of the task. There are a few in Australia that specialise in this type of transport.
You should also get your hardware vendors involved in the move. Notify them well ahead of time. They might have resources to help with issues that arise, whether with hardware or software. You should involve your vendors whether the equipment you use from them is new or existing. They might have special procedures for you to use when shutting things down, or there might be certain components they want you to remove, such as a flash drive or hard drive. They might want to seed the equipment differently in the new location.
One consideration is the differentiation between who you purchase the hardware from isn’t always the most appropriate third party to obtain external professional services from. During the procurement phase, a business should always carefully consider weighting separation of suppliers between hardware and professional service offerings. Particularly when working with systems integrators who work on the same types of platforms. In my experience the hardware is always about the cost, and the professional services is always about the quality of delivery as well as the cost. In the later the reputation of the supplier’s professional service delivery is a critical decision and can on occasion either make or break a data centre relocation.
Moving a data centre is a challenging task. Arguably a highly niche space for experienced project managers, but one that can potentially bring significant benefits to your organisation. With the proper planning, patience, effort, and resources, such a move can be executed smoothly and efficiently.
If you are currently looking at data centre relocations, and you would like a quick 30-minute strategy conversation about this type of project feel free to lock in a time slot via the schedule button above