Your Go-To Checklist for a Smooth Data Centre Migration

Relocating a data centre is a complex task with numerous components. While an expert team can execute a migration in just a few days if needed, thorough planning is crucial for success. To ensure a seamless transition, it’s vital to document and create a comprehensive migration plan that keeps business operations intact. Attention to detail is critical. Our checklist includes strategies to avoid common data centre migration pitfalls, aiming for the smoothest possible process.

This timeline is suited for medium-sized deployments of up to 40 cabinets. Migration times vary based on company size and IT complexity, and this timeline can be adjusted accordingly. The top priority in all migrations is minimizing downtime. Anunta’s team can provide essential support in planning your migration, and we recommend engaging our team for the best results.

What is a Data Centre Migration?

A data centre is a facility that houses computing, storage, and network resources, providing resilient environmental, power, and network redundancy. These highly complex and technologically advanced centres feature intricate systems, architecture, and networks.

Data centres can be privately owned and managed or publicly owned with privately managed “pods” of resources sold to various organizations. Due to the complexities of data centre resources, organizations may have reasons to migrate from one data centre to another.

Types of Data Center Migrations

Managing risk is crucial to prevent business disruption regardless of the reason for planning a data centre or application migration.

Choosing the right migration strategy allows you to control the risks to your critical infrastructure better and ensures smoother business continuity during the transition.

Here are the four main methods to migrate your data centre:

• Consolidation migration: Streamline your data infrastructure by consolidating multiple data centres into smaller, more extensive facilities that can handle your current workload and quickly scale your organization’s growth. This consolidation will help reduce maintenance costs.
• Colocation or relocation migration: Relocate your entire data centre to a new site, often choosing a superior physical location with enhanced equipment access or a third-party collocated data centre. Colocation enables you to scale up while sharing expenses with a third party.
• Cloud migration: Cloud migration transfers data, workloads, and IT infrastructure from on-premises or off-site data centres to private or public cloud platforms. This pay-as-you-go model eliminates upfront hardware and infrastructure costs and offers the flexibility to scale up or down. As a result, around 70 per cent of businesses are now incorporating workloads on the public cloud.
• Hybrid cloud migration: Hybrid migration involves moving specific workloads and applications to the cloud while keeping others on-premise or off-site. This approach optimizes workloads and ensures that the failure of one data centre does not disrupt the entire workflow.

When Should You Plan for a Data Centre Migration?

A business evolves through various stages, and here are some critical times to consider planning a data centre migration.

Hardware End-of-Life

As data centre hardware surpasses the 5-7-year mark, the risk of failures and downtime increases. Nokia and Google Cloud demonstrate how timely upgrades are crucial for modernizing infrastructure to boost performance and reliability.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions can create redundant infrastructure. Effective data centre migration strategies address these overlaps and streamline operations like Euronext’s move from London to Milan.

Feature Limitations

Older data centres often need more modern features like advanced security, redundancy, and automation. FedEx upgraded its facilities to overcome these limitations and meet growing customer demands.

Capacity Reached

Business growth can exceed a facility’s power, cooling, or space limits. In 2016, Spotify migrated to Google Cloud to address storage and cooling challenges caused by its expanding needs.

Performance Requirements

Rising performance demands for processing power and bandwidth may require migrating to more scalable and efficient infrastructure solutions.

Cloud Operating Model

A cloud operating model provides the agility and scalability to adapt to evolving business needs. Top global businesses leverage cloud solutions for their IT infrastructure for cost-effectiveness and growth.

What are the Benefits of a Data Centre Migration?

Migrating to a new data center can provide numerous benefits, including:

Performance Improvement: Upgrading to a new data center can drastically improve performance through faster networking, state-of-the-art hardware, and optimized software configurations, leading to enhanced user experiences and operational efficiency.

Disaster Recovery: Modern data centers offer superior disaster recovery capabilities with automated failover, real-time data replication, and geographically distributed backups, ensuring business continuity and minimal downtime in case of disasters.

Resource Optimization: Migrating to a new data center allows for better resource optimization through virtualization and containerization technologies. This leads to more efficient use of computing resources, reducing waste and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

Minimized disruption of adopting new technologies: When effectively managed within a modern infrastructure, transitioning to the latest data technology can maintain workflow and operational continuity.

How to Plan for a Successful Data Centre Migration

A data center migration project plan should start with cataloging the existing assets to be relocated or retired if needed. This essential discovery phase can be conducted manually or automated with third-party software tools.

No matter the data center migration methodology an organization adopts, the objective is to identify application requirements and map out a migration plan. A successful data center migration should be compatible with current applications and cater to the future needs of the enterprise’s workload.

Key areas to consider when assessing a data center for migration include:

Contractual Obligations: Review the terms and conditions related to your current data center, especially the termination clauses.

Hardware Inventory: List all physical servers and infrastructure equipment that need to be moved or replaced.

Communications Inventory: Catalog all non-tangible network resources and configurations to be migrated, replaced, or retired, such as IP information, internet networks, telco lines, domain names, and contact details for leased resources.

Applications Inventory: Identify all applications running on data center hardware, detailing the physical or logical machines they operate on and any external servers they interact with. This inventory maps the interconnections within your data center and with external entities.

The Bottom Line

Data centre migration is one of an organization’s most intricate processes. It requires precise and calculated changes to ensure systems remain online or are quickly restored.

The benefits of a successful migration are significant. It enables a business to upgrade to a more modern and advanced data center and facilitates moving resources to the cloud. With thorough planning, testing, and execution, organizations can achieve a smooth and successful data center migration.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a data centre migration?
Answer: A data centre migration is the process of moving your organization’s IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, and network resources, from one data centre to another. This migration could involve moving to a new physical location, consolidating data centres, or transitioning to a cloud environment. It is a strategic move aimed at improving performance, scaling resources, or upgrading technology.

What are the main types of data centre migrations?
Answer: The main types are:

• Consolidation Migration: Combine multiple data centres into one.
• Colocation Migration: Move to a new facility or share space with another organization.
• Cloud Migration: Transfer data and applications to a public or private cloud.
• Hybrid Cloud Migration: Move some resources to the cloud while keeping others on-premises.

When should a business plan for a data centre migration?
Answer: A business should consider a data centre migration when:

• Hardware is outdated or at end-of-life.
• There are mergers or acquisitions creating redundant infrastructure.
• Current data centres lack modern features or have reached capacity limits.
• Performance demands are increasing or new technologies need to be adopted.

What are the benefits of a data centre migration?
Answer: Here are the benefits of a data centre migration:

• Performance Improvement: Better hardware and networking for faster operations.
• Disaster Recovery: Advanced systems for backup and recovery.
• Resource Optimization: More efficient use of computing resources.
• Technology Adoption: Easier to integrate new technologies and tools.

How do I plan for a successful data centre migration?
Answer: To plan a successful data centre migration, start by cataloging all of your existing assets, including hardware, applications, and communications resources. Review your current data centre’s contracts and terms, especially focusing on termination clauses. Create detailed inventories of your physical servers, network configurations, and application setups. Develop a comprehensive migration plan that addresses both your current requirements and future growth needs to ensure a smooth transition.