Data Center Migration Overview

Data Center Migration


As the name suggests, a data centre migration involves relocating any existing data centre operating environment of a business to another location or operating environment. Transferring all your data centre assets and resources requires the logical and operational relocation of the data centre environment before you can move physically or virtually entirely into the new environment. This process is comprehensive and requires extensive planning. 

The planning process should ideally start with making accurate catalogues of existing assets and categorizing them as per business requirements. For instance, it might make sense to move some assets, while others may no longer be as relevant and should be retired. This is known as the discovery phase of the migration and can be done manually, which generally proves resource-intensive or automated through the help of third-party services. Before any organization embarks on a migration process, they need to identify all relevant application requirements and map their migration process with as much clarity as possible. You know your migration is successful when existing applications have the highest degree of compatibility and prove capable of meeting company workloads' current and future requirements. IT Support San Diego offers highly reputed data centre migration services.


Checklist for Data Center Migration

Assessment of Data Center

In order to migrate with a good degree of success, businesses need to be aware of the exact capabilities of the data centre. Companies must pay attention to details such as network, server, and operating system requirements and evaluate all applications supported by the data centre.

Creating an effective migration strategy

Any migration process is doomed to failure if it does not start out with a clear strategy and Data Center Migration Checklist. This means that companies need to document their requirements exhaustively, such as all requisite equipment, connectivity diagrams, cooling infrastructure, mapping of space and storage, energy requirements, and more. For help with the most effective Data Center Migration Strategy, please contact IT Support Santa Ana.

Know your destination

This does not mean just knowing the physical location of your data centre but also all of its attributes. You need to know your storage space requirements, power requirements, security, and location. All of these will combine and help you have clarity on your destination. Depending on your needs, you could choose to go with a private data centre or a cloud location.

Final Planning

In this step companies will need to conduct a thorough design and review of the multiple steps involved in the migration process. This is the final review before the development can begin, so companies need to pay special attention to all relevant technologies and stakeholders.

Development

Once the Development phase begins, you will need to have access to the physical infrastructure required to support the processes and carefully review all the infrastructure's disparate elements, so you don't have to make any last-second changes. You also need to pay attention to the benchmark performance of applications and review them.

Validation

This is perhaps one of the most critical Data Center Migration Steps in the process and involves validating all the different parts of the plan. Allow all critical components of the infrastructure to cool down (shut them down if necessary) and once they have cooled, try forwarding them on again to see if they work optimally. If you experience any hitches in the process, such as problems with restarting etc., you should try and replace them depending on the severity of the problem. It is also advisable for companies to conduct some degree of business validation to update all relevant state folders on any changes in the migration process.


Migration

If you have already nailed down your data center migration strategy, doing the actual migration should be simple. This applies to all critical applications and components that should be migrated as per your original strategy. In this phase, you should also test out the data consistency and check all data, applications and network configurations. One benefit of running these tests is that they can help you anticipate the time that will potentially be taken by the migration process.

Post-Migration Verification

This is done to check whether all the services running before can still run without any problems. Companies also need to verify the removal of all software that was specific to the hardware that was being used.

Data Center Migration Benefits

Improved Efficiency

Companies are very common to overload their capacity to store data during growth cycles. If the data centre migration process is completed successfully, it can help companies with both increased efficiency and capability to store data.

Cost Reduction

Many companies are quite loath to undertake data centre migration because it proves to be a pretty expensive process. But once the process is completed, companies can expect benefits from reduced data centre expenses in the long run. Also, all of the redundant and unnecessary data discovered during the data migration process can be removed. This obviously ends up saving a lot of storage space and maintenance costs.

Improved Security

Migrating data centres to better quality systems or cloud-based services automatically upgrade the security of the data. Companies also have the scope to double down on their own data centre security measures. For a comprehensive list of Data Center Migration Best Practices, please check out Managed IT Services in Santa Ana.

About Steven:

Steven Truong is a Marketing Coordinator at I.T. Responsive; IT Consulting San Diego company. Steven has a professional background in marketing and communications for small to medium-sized businesses in several industries. He's well-versed in creating effective marketing strategies for the clients.