10 Best Practices for Data Center Consolidation

by Chris Preimesberger

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.

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.

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.

Minimize changes during the move, planning and execution periods to reduce risks and complications to the project.

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.

Understand the needs and requirements of the lines of business before getting a consolidation project moving.

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.

Plan for capacity issues by using tools for understanding capacity utilization in addition to tools for longer-term capacity modeling.

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.

If anything can go wrong, it will. Develop a test environment and do rigorous testing under production conditions.