- 10 Best Practices for Data Center Consolidation
- Map Out Capacity Needed
- Communications Lines Must Be Open
- Prepare a Way to Measure Progress
- Keep It Simple, Stupid
- Experience Counts
- Align with Business Needs
- Take Roll of All Assets
- Use a Tool Set You Can Trust
- Applying Best Practices Is Always a Wise Choice
- Test, Test and Test Again
10 Best Practices for Data Center Consolidation
by Chris Preimesberger
Map Out Capacity Needed
Plan the capacity required to support the move, the time it will take, the skills required, and the interrelations between software applications and the systems that support them. Poor planning is the No. 1 reason for a failed or overbudget data center consolidation and migration.
Communications Lines Must Be Open
Ensure that facilities and IT managers talk. IT professionals frequently underestimate power requirements and power costs, particularly if facilities management pays the bills, which is quite often the case.
Prepare a Way to Measure Progress
Establish preconsolidation baselines to measure success before moving into your new data center. Lack of success metrics can result in dissatisfaction of the project results.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
Minimize changes during the move, planning and execution periods to reduce risks and complications to the project.
Experience Counts
Include someone with data center consolidation experience on the moving team. Since a data center move is generally a once-in-a-career event for IT professionals, few companies have the expertise on-hand to do it well. Find someone who has the expertise if your organization does not.
Align with Business Needs
Understand the needs and requirements of the lines of business before getting a consolidation project moving.
Take Roll of All Assets
Develop as complete an asset picture as possible prior to starting a data center consolidation. Too often, data center asset information is spread across the organization in spreadsheets, Visio diagrams and handwritten notes.
Use a Tool Set You Can Trust
Plan for capacity issues by using tools for understanding capacity utilization in addition to tools for longer-term capacity modeling.
Applying Best Practices Is Always a Wise Choice
Use best practice processes and solutions to automatically discover IT assets, visualize the physical infrastructure, model the consolidation, control data center processes and personnel, report on the progress, and predict capacity resources well into the future.
Test, Test and Test Again
If anything can go wrong, it will. Develop a test environment and do rigorous testing under production conditions.