Migrating your data center from one location to a new facility can be a monumental task. The process is complex, with many considerations to make, challenges to overcome, and things to go wrong. That’s why we’ve put together this helpful post all about data center migration best practices. We’ll cover everything you need to know about the best practices for undertaking a data center migration or transfer or servers.
We’ll start by looking at your organization’s needs and the reasons behind the move. Then we’ll dive into the big-picture strategies that will help you evaluate options for your new data center environment and how it can support your IT infrastructure, storage systems, business operations, private clouds, and overall migration during the migration project.
1. Put A Data Center Migration Plan In Place
The most important part of any successful data migration is the planning phase. Make sure you have a plan in place before you start, with clear details of what you’re trying to do and an outline of what can go wrong during the move.
Planning is also necessary for data security solutions purposes, including regulatory compliance and disaster recovery planning. Your new location should also be ready for power capacity, cooling, and other amenities that are required by the facilities team, project manager, and other internal business units.
Here are the benefits of the discovery phase and project plan:
- effectively managing risk
- decreased compliance risks
- minimized migration costs
- mitigate risk with a multi phased migration approach
- cross functional discussions for cost optimization
- creating a backup strategy to minimize risk
- identify success outcomes and successful transition
- minimize all the headaches
2. Establish A Target Data Center Relocation Clear Timeline
This is another important step, because you’ll need to know how long it will take for your project to be completed. This way, you can keep an eye on progress and any changes you need to make along the way.
A good data center migration timeline will include:
- The initial and final locations of the operating environment, and how they relate to your IT needs and project team.
- How long the move will take once completed. This time frame is important for things like deciding on suppliers and contractors, as well as determining where to staff for support during the transition period as this information can change as you gather more information about what you’re trying to accomplish during your move.
- Any specific milestones that need to be met along the way.
You also want to consider the time for completing specific tasks. You don’t necessarily need to do everything all at once, but rather figure out what the most important things are and start there.
3. Create A Budget
When budgeting for a data center move, you’ll need to make sure it fits into your existing IT budget and your overall company strategy. You should also look at the cost of a new data center as a one-off investment, rather than a recurring expense on utility bills and labor costs related to keeping the new site going.
You’ll start by looking at the big picture. Estimate how much it will cost to physically move existing hardware from the old site to your new location. This includes the cost of remediating the existing location and returning it to a clean state. It also includes who will be doing this work – whether your own staff or a third party technical team.
4. Identify Who Will Handle Equipment Uninstallation And Transport
The more experienced people you have handling the equipment, the less of a challenge the data center migration process will be for them. You’ll want to assign one or more people to handle unit unboxing, removal, and transportation of IT gear.
Make sure you have the best people handling:
- transferring existing data
- functional testing
- migrating refactored applications
- performance testing
- identify assets
- migrating data, storage system, critical components and existing infrastructure
- application migration
- post migration of critical applications, servers, network, infrastructure for successful data center migration
Once this is done, you’ll need to identify how you will migrate all of your equipment into the new data center. Remember that time is critical, so don’t take too long moving each piece of IT gear—move it as quick as possible without damaging anything.
5. Make Sure Your Equipment Is Thoroughly Cataloged
One of the easiest ways to mess up the migration process is by forgetting an important piece of equipment. So make sure you spend time doing a cabinet by cabinet catalog of each piece of hardware and software before you bring it anywhere. This includes creating a detailed map of the existing data center, which will help you find everything when it comes time to set it all up at your new center.
You may want to create a data center migration checklist to ensure successful migration to your new data centers.
6. Consider Your Provider’s Equipment Suggestions
During the migration process, you’ll need to make sure everything is ready to go. This means your company suppliers will be sending you equipment, and many of these will already be equipped with specific hardware and software for the needs of your new environment.
Choose suppliers who know what they’re doing and what to migrate, preferably those who specialize in successful, larger network data center migration projects. They’ll often have equipment that’s designed especially for the kind of migrations you need to accomplish during the moving process.
7. Provision New Network Services In Advance
One of the biggest pains when it comes to data center moves is when you need to recover network services after the move. It’s important to make sure you have set up all of these systems in advance, because it will prevent a lot of headaches down the road.
You’ll want to identify any applications, network devices, or software that will be used in the new data center infrastructure. It’s also important that you have access information ready before you begin your data center migration.
Liquis: Experts In Data Center Migrations
When migrating your data center from one facility to another, it’s incredibly important to know what you’re doing. If you’re not sure, then you may need to enlist the help of professionals like Liquis who have been doing it for many years. You can even learn more about our data center decommissioning services here.
Ready to get started? The first step is to get in touch with our data center migration experts today!