Minimising downtime.

How to minimise downtime during a data centre move

Once the decision has been taken to perform a data centre relocation or cloud migration, there is often considerable pressure from stakeholders to complete the process as quickly as possible, but this is an operation that cannot and should not be rushed. Everyone dreads downtime, and by its nature a data centre move is going to disrupt your operations to some extent. Here are 6 key ways to minimise downtime.

 

1. Create an asset inventory

In order to perform a successful move, everyone involved has to have thorough knowledge of both your current and future data environment. This inventory should be as detailed as possible and include –

• All data architecture and infrastructure
• All software and hardware assets
• All applications
• All users and workloads
• Comprehensive network maps, including configurations and interdependencies
• All stored data. Sub-group where necessary to include unstructured, structured, sensitive and raw.
• Security environment considerations, including peripheral devices and endpoints

2. Create a migration plan

The need to formulate a cohesive data centre move strategy is paramount. Planning at this stage should be comprehensive and realistic with a solid phased timeline. A well devised project plan will keep the complexities of this move clear and under control. It should be constantly consulted, reviewed and where necessary, updated.

• The first step in creating a plan is to define your objectives: – what exactly you are migrating in terms of hardware and software? Your migration strategy must reference both your current and future environment. Everything should be cross referenced with the asset inventory you’ve just created.

• Detail the resources you’ll need;- personnel, capital, technology, third parties.• Create a timeline considering all of these factors, with every step clearly annotated and defined into phases. Above all, be realistic and factor in contingency for each phase.

• By now, you should be able to recognise and annotate your most business reliant assets, so you can start to plan which assets need to be back online first. Every hardware and software asset detailed in your inventory will need its own migration map in order to do this.

3. Teams, delegation and resource provisioning

A data centre move may be a technical process, but it always affects more than your tech team, so everyone in your organisation needs to be kept informed (and involved where relevant). You may need to perform an internal skills audit in order to assign clearly defined roles within your organisation. Create a personnel leader for each team and/or phase. This is a good point at which to make doubly sure that you and your relevant team(s) have a complete understanding of the new data environment you’re moving into.

4. Review your data migration plan and create a checklist

Listen to the feedback from your teams and review and update your migration plan. Be realistic, update contingency times and always prepare for worst case scenarios. Now is the time to formulate a master checklist:- this may seem like marking your own homework, but a good checklist will take the shape of a short form version of your plan, and should be at hand at all times.

5. Create a data backup and recovery plan

It may be surprising, but data backup and recovery is often overlooked. This is a big transition, and it always pays to the unforeseen. Everything from unexpected networking issues, communication breakage, incompatibility, new data centre problems to plain old bad weather and power outages can (and does) happen – which is why data loss is the single biggest risk involved in any migration. If possible, run a test recovery plan and as ever, keep cloud and offsite backups.

6. Consider using a third party data move specialist

Data migration specialists don’t run your company – that’s what you do best. This is what they do best, day in day out. Your creation of a migration strategy, checklist, teams are all designed to make sure that you’ve thought this through from every possible angle. A third party specialist is one more set of eyes to run your plan past, as well as bringing their experience from countless migrations to help you with a smooth and successful move.

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