Data Centre Migration Phases

We need to focus on in any data centre migrations and these are best practices that we always
employ when we're doing our projects and I like to share with you what those are there
Are five key areas that we always focus on

First is ASSESSMENTS

 We need to be able to find out what your environment looks like today before we can plan on
making changes to their environment and moving into the target location

Second is to DESIGN

 Once we find out what your environment looks like once we've done the assessment we will
now we want to do a design of how are we going to migrate that environment from where it is
today to where you want to go now that target location could be from on-premise to on-
premise it could be from on-premise to cloud or it could be from cloud to cloud the underlying
processes are all going to remain the same the funk the fundamentals are going to remain the
same

third is IMPLEMENTATION

 Now that you've assessed your environment, you've designed how your migration is going to
occur now you want to actually hit the ground running and make those changes in the
implementation discussion, we'll discuss what are some of the key areas that you need to pay
attention to make sure that you have a successful migration

fourth is TESTING

 Very critical because when you’re making changes which are critical two your business while
moving your environment from one location two the other you want to be able to make sure
that your target environment is functioning exactly the way your source environment is
functioning today and testing will allow you to do that and the last but of course not the

least is MANAGEMENT

 We want to be able to have an overarching project management approach of how do you

manage is such a large complex initiative like this now not all migrations are going to be
complex some of them may be quite simple but anytime you're making changes within an
environment it brings some complexity to it so you need a project management approach
which looks at all the risks that are involved and that can actually address those risks in
working with the subject matter experts before you make that change during the changes
happening and of course after the changes made so these are all the areas that we're going
to be discussing and I hope you'll enjoy the talk
ASSESSMENTS PHASE
we're going to be discussing today is the assessment phase of the best practices of data
centre of transitions there are a total of eight different areas that you could potentially do
perform an assessment on now that doesn't mean that you may have
to do all eight assessments
1. first and foremost is an APPLICATION ASSESSMENT
now I may spend the most amount of time an application assessment discussing
this with you because that is probably the most critical when you're making a transition from
a data canter one data centre to another data centre you're not only moving Hardware you're
actually moving your applications the hardware is just the foundation of what runs your
applications so when you're making an assessment of which applications to move
which wave groups to move them in it's extremely critical because if you take an application
and let's say it has dependencies between different applications and you move two of the
three applications that have dependencies and you haven't moved the third one well guess
what your target data centre where your environment is running with you to applications it's
going to look for the third one and it will have to go across the wire if you have that ability
still to your older data centre to access your data now performance is going to be very poor
and it may not even work because you may not have the necessary bandwidth nor the port
opened up for you to access so assessments are extremely critical

2. NETWORK AND SECURITY ASSESSMENT when you're transitioning your entire

data
Centre there are a lot of key areas within the network and security that you need to address
are you going to be upgrading in your new data centre so when you do the assessment at the
source what are some of the functionalities that you don't have that you would like
To have and what are some of the key things that you want to optimize is your security at
your existing data centre up to par with what your business requirements are or your client
Requirements are or whatever other regulatory requirements

3. INVENTORY ASSESSMENT that means exactly that we are going to take an inventory
of your physical environment very critical especially if you're not doing a greenfield build
basically meaning that you're not deploying a brand new environment at your target data
centre if you're going to be doing a brownfield which basically means that you're going to be
putting in some new equipment at the target as well as moving some existing equipment then
you need to do a full inventory you need to understand what your environment
looks like today before you move it so that would go that would mean going on site taking
pictures of your equipment labelling your existing labels that are there drawing out a
schematic on where your cables are connected things of that nature so you can be as broad or
as detailed depending on what your requirements are

4. CONFIGURATION ASSESSMENT how are your equipment configured how is your

San switch configured how is your network configured how is your land or sand configured
how are your service configured I using your management are using an aisle or an IDE rack
so those type of things you need to have a very clear detailed design on what your
information the environment that you currently have in place looks like today

5.CONNECTIVITY ASSESSMENT what are the connectivity between your external

applications that you may have out living in the DMZ or if you have customers that are
accessing your applications within your data centre how about your access into the new data
centre because obviously we're going to need to migrate the data from one data center to
another we need to make sure that we have that connectivity assessment done so that we can
determine what our requirements are going to be in the subsequent phases that we'll be
discussing

6) PROCESS ASSESSMENT very key right now you're operating on a day to day business
you are looking at your day to day business with processes that you have in place for normal
SL AIDS when you're doing a data center transition you may not be in a position to follow
the same SL A's for example you find out during the move that you need to purchase a sand
HBA for an hour server well your procurement process may be three weeks maybe a month
or may be only one week or two days you need to make sure that you have provisions put in
place so that during that time frame you can actually order the equipment that you need in a
lot more expedient manner than what your standard SLA czar

7) CABLING ASSESSMENT we want to be able to look at your cabling that you have in
your data center because of course there are several factors that come into play number one is
you want to be able to document so if you're moving your gear from your source data center
to the target that your cabling is indeed identical to what it is at the target data center so you
need to be able to map how your cabling and you need to be able to do it an elevation map of
your how your racking is going to be now no one wants to think about this but what if you
have to back out meaning that you forklifted let's say and you've shifted
your gear from your sources that Harvey data center but you have to back out for whatever
reason well if you don't have a cabling this has been done and document all your cabling
when you ship the hardware back how are you going to connect all your cables so that's a
critical path and the last is I think I've already gone through eight of them but I'll give you
one high one is you need to food do a

8)FULL DATA CENTER ASSESSMENT you need to be able to look at what are some of
the key things that you may be missing that need to be addressed when you're migrating most
organizations don't even realize that they have servers out in there that they may not have in
their master server list for example but when you do your assessment where you look at every
single component in your data center you will be able to catch that and be ready for the
design phase of this project

DESIGN PHASE
Design phase is where you actually take the information that you've gotten during the assessment
process and design your migration strategy how are you going to actually perform the migration
the first thing you want to look at is the application grouping we referenced that briefly in the
assessment phase of it but it's very critical and I want two reiterate whenever you're doing a
migration your design should be around your applications now the hardware itself is obviously is very
critical so you can be virtualizing you may be doing your physical to physical you may be doing a
physical to virtual you may be doing a virtual to virtual regardless of what that is that's still the
foundation but what runs on that environment are your applications so you need to be able to group
those applications so that when you're performing the migration it is not risking your day-to-operations
and your application workload second is you want to develop a migration method how are you going
to migrate if you're going from a physical to physical are you actually going to take the image of the
server and deploy it on the new server or are you going to build a new server and only migrate the
data or if you're doing your virtual to virtual how are you going to do that are you going to do that over
the wire are you going to do it where you capture it locally onto some swing storage and then
replicas and then ship it to the target location and then replicate the deltas because a lot of these
things have a very critical approach to what your requirements are going to be for your
infrastructure for example if you're doing a swing approach your bandwidth requirements are going to
be a lot less than if you're doing a over the wire migration replication approach then you want to
prepare a risk analysis now there are different methodologies to do a transition one is to shut down
everything and move it obviously there are risks inherent to that right one risk for example is these
server doesn't come up on the in target location but you've got data on there that you need to get well
there are some things that we can do to even mitigate risks against that which is to capture the data
locally in the source data center before you shut it down we call that the risk assessment or risk
mitigation process second is you want to be able to assess what the impact is going to be on your
applications how much dime downtime can your application sustain do you have an application that is
run 724 healthcare is a critical area because healthcare obviously never sleeps if you're if you're a
hospital that's migrating your environment how are you going to mitigate against risks what kind of
backups are you going two have available in the event that something goes wrong with your
application how much downtime can you sustain what are some of the doubt what are some of the
time frames that are least impacting to your environment so a lot of those risk assessments will need
to be done and then you also develop a migration plan what's going to happen during wave 1 wave to
wave 3 what are some of the steps typically in a migration plan you're going to document now the
tools that you're going to need you're going to document what is the process flow how are you going
two actually migrate the data from your source environment to your target are you going to do a file
level migration are you going to do a block level migration a lot of these things come into play quite a
bit when you're doing these migrations because the design phase of it is what's going to
dictate how well your migration is going to go and oftentimes we have migrations where we may have
multiple designs developed for different types of applications some application can sustain a down
time and we may do a forklift we shut the server down we ship it to the target we bring it back up
but obviously always making sure that we mitigate risk by capturing the data before we do that other
migrations we cannot afford any time so we need to look at methodologies that we would migrate the
data while the server is still or the application is still in use so all these things are definitely
definite areas that you want to focus on when you're looking at or when you're doing your design
phase of the migration effort

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE
Implementation phase this is where the rubber meets the road we are going to discuss two key
areas that are going to be critical in any data center migration one is the logical piece the
other one is the physical piece the logical piece is important because that's where we actually
move the data in the applications the physical piece is where we move the hard work from
one location to the other so let's look at the logical piece first what's required in the
implementation well one is we've already decided how we're going to move the data we've
decided what tools were going to use and we've decided what methodologies we're going to
use two migrate those that data that were that we're looking to transfer now in that you may
have tools that need to be deployed what does that mean infrastructure requirements it means
that you need to get your source environment and your target environment ready for those
tools to be accepted it may be servers that you would deploy out there it may be temporary
storage do you deploy out there so it's very critical to do that you also going two implement
any tools that need to be applied to the hosts themselves what if you're installing an agent on
a doing the host base migration well when you're doing that it requires you potentially
to may be require to do a reboot if that's the case you need to plan that out that's an
implementation stuff how are you going to replicate the data are you going to be deployed
using swing storage as we discussed in previous assessment phase and as well as the
design phase or are you going to be doing it over the wire so a lot of these things will come
into play quite in quite detail are you going to class your environment meaning shut it down
so that you can have a clean image for testing at the target before you cut over or are you just
going to get a crash consistent image when you're replicating to the target a lot of these things
will determine what type of implementation steps you need to take now let's look at the
physical aspect of it the physical aspect is pretty straightforward you need to figure out what
you're going two move and how are you going to move it we've already made a determination
on what your waves are going to look like what hardware is going to move in your
different wave groups you need to go on site you need to label that you need two document
everything to the team of exactly how things are going to move which movers are you going
to use are you going to be what kind of insurance are you going to be using does it need
to be climate-controlled a lot of these things how long is it going to take for the transition do
you have your target environment already prepped if you're moving hardware from your
source location of the target location you want to make sure that your target environment has
all the cabling done before your transition day because of course when during your cut over
time you want to be able to quickly unwrap pack ship re-rack Andry cable you don't
want to be running cable during that time so a lot of these things are going to be done prior to
the cut over

TESTING PHASE
The testing phase equally as important we want to be able to make sure that the migrated
environment is indeed working the way it's supposed to be working and it's signed off on by
the respective parties such as the application owners and the business owners so there are two
types of tests that we typically see when we're doing a data center transition first is the UAT
test which is user acceptance testing and the second is a performance testing so let's discuss
UAT testing first the key areas that you want to focus on when you're doing a UAT test is
you analyse the business you analyse what the requirements are what do their application per
would purpose do they serve how are they being used who uses them second is to be
identified the UAT scenarios what it is going to be involved during the actual testing
process what are the customer wanting two achieve is it that they want to press a button and a
command happens and a certain time frame and it actually accomplishes whatever is meant to
accomplish those are some of the things that we want to discuss with the client and make sure
that we're documenting those and then we want to define the test we want to document each
and every test scenario to know that which applications if they're functioning the way they're
supposed to be functioning now some customers do require may require some organizations
excuse me requires that all applications be tested but many times most companies are looking
at their critical applications and if they are comfortable in knowing that those critical
applications are functioning the way they're function that they're supposed to be they're
happy with the transition now they may find later on as they're starting to use the other
applications that some applications may not be functioning as it's supposed to mean if they're
not critical they'll address them as when they're starting to find out but most of the times the
critical applications is what's typically looked at for the user acceptance testing the
next one is performance testing this is very key most organizations when they're moving
their data center from the source to the target they're looking for improved performance
where the
performance testing really plays a key role is to make sure that you're actually not under
performance to what you were at the source after the migration effectively because of many
different things it could be storage configuration it could be bandwidth it could be
configuration that was potentially missed when you were doing your waves breakdown and
you left an application at your target data center which should have moved with during that
wave because it has a dependency a lot of those things are the database servers in the same
data center that that's supposed to be in a lot of those things will be caught during the
performance testing now how does that happen typically performance testing you can do
a baseline testing and the baseline testing will give you what the performance is for that
particular application at the source data center and again same thing is you eighty you
will actually be selecting a certain set of applications that you want to test after you do the
baseline we do the migration after the migration we would do another benchmark test want to
figure out that the performance that you were seeing at the source are indeed the same
at the target so in that scenario it allows you to know that you're in a better state if not the
same as what you were the source now most companies typically always have some level of
testing done either you a to your performance they may not formally classify it as such so you
may not actually say there's a performance test but then they start complaining well my
application is responding slower than what it should be what that means is you need to start
investigating what some of the issues could potentially be now if you had actually done a
baseline testing before you can actually test that quite a bit more effectively because you have
a you have data from how your environment look like from day one versus your target
environment
MANAGEMENT PHASE
the project management phase is one that holds everything together because your project
manager there or program manager how does the responsibility of making sure that all
the previous steps all to the previous phases that we spoke about are happening in an effective
manner and they're actually happening the way they're supposed to be happening there are
several steps that we believe our best practices in a project management aspect of ideas and
within a dataset transition first is you want to develop a project scope you want to figure out
what is the project going to entail you want to do your due diligence you also want two
identify any risks and tracking of issues that may come up because a migration can be very
complex if you don't have a very very sound project management behind it it's only going to
make things worse you're not going two have a cohesive approach to doing a transition you
need that in one person or that one group who is ultimately responsible for the entire
transition you will have different subject matter experts within the organization but the
person who is going to have that responsibility for the entire transition is going to be the ease
of the project or the program manager second you want to develop a sign a program Charter
what does that mean that means that you need to get buy-in from your management now
how many of you have actually done projects where you don't have a buy-in from your
project manager from your business owners or your your all the reaches of sea level you
won't get the support you won't get the flexibility that you need one of the things that we
talked about before was your procurement process where you need to in during a transition
you need be able to get something quickly rather than follow your process that give you a
three-week SLA you need to be able to get your buy-in from your management very
important the other thing within this realm of a charter is you need to be able to put together a
communication plan you need to be able to say if escalations need two be made who are they
going to go to how are you going to be escalating who are the business owners who are the
managers of the difference means that you're working with next you need to develop
the good old project schedule everyone loves the schedule everyone loves to
know exactly what's going to happen when very important the only way project can
sustain on schedule and on budget is two have a formalized approach and how you're going
to do things and have milestones to load documented also timeline we've been in situations in
the past and I'll share with you where the customer comes to us and say we've got to be out of
a data center in three months whereas the ideal situation in that scenario should have been six
months earlier but we have to do what we have to do now in this scenario we have to
have a very aggressive schedule so what does that mean that means that the business owners
have a lot of stake because they have to be out of a data center the management have a lot of
stake and also the subject matter experts have a lot of stake so everyone has to have the buy-
in everyone needs two understand what your deliverables need to be for you to be able to
make that timeline and then we initiate the project now initiating project is where again the
rubber meets the road because in that scenario you're going to have two maintain your
schedule you're going two have weekly maybe daily conference call with the DBA s with the
systems administrators with the application owners with the storage team the network
team Dennis I know migrations are very complex so you're going to have a lot of team
members coming through coming together to discuss what needs to be discussed typically
most organizations approach it in two fashions one is they meet as an application group
and then within it they will meet with the different IT groups because if you
have several applications that are shared between different infrastructures well you want to be

able to concentrate on an application centric approach and then also engage the underlying
foundational or infrastructure IT departments that are responsible for that one of the things I
will share with you as my parting message on the management piece of it is lessons
learned everyone is human we all learn as we go through we learn in every migration that we
go through every day so you want to be able to take those lessons learn and you want to apply
it to subsequent phases or subsequent waves that's the only way you're going two improve
and every environment is extremely different so you want to be able to look at your
environment look at what actually needs to improve from the last time you did the migrations
if you're doing let's say five waves how is wave one different than wave two then
three four five you should definitely be improving and you may find different things within
each wave but the goal is that you always are continually improving and the project manager
is the one who's really going to make sure that those lessons learn are included in
every subsequent wave that goes on