A data center relocation is a corporate heart transplant. It cannot be allowed to fail, for the health, well-being and perhaps the very life of the corporation depends on the relocation being a success. The gravity of such an undertaking – and successfully supporting it - is a responsibility those who have been supporting mission critical infrastructures over the years fully understand. But the uniqueness of such a project guarantees that few employees have very much, if any, prior experience in it.

As you might expect, data center migration is a big business. Traditional as well as relatively new startup firms are earning millions of dollars a year running migrations. Their consultants are the experts in the field. They know what software tools to use and what questions to ask. They understand the physical logistics of a migration and the third-party vendors to engage. The client corporations needing to migrate a production data center had better involve a business that specializes in this work or they will most certainly suffer greatly, if not fail altogether.

Over the course of a migration project that may take years to complete, it is certainly easy for the client to become detached from the thousands of tasks and nuances that any data center move entails. Weekly team meetings, web-based status graphs and conference calls present only a limited snapshot at any one instant. Since employees are performing their regular jobs, plus those related to the move, the added workload will cause compromises in a worker’s efficiency in both areas. That’s to be understood, but it needs to be a major factor in the project plan.
The following provisions should be incorporated by the client to ensure that the best interests of the business remains a priority during all phases of the move.

The first step in a data center migration is to form a project team. Members of this team should represent as many of the corporate disciplines as possible. As a corporate leader, you must realize that this first step is the most important one in the entire data center migration.

The selection of key employees for leadership roles in the data center move is extremely important. You choose them based on their past experiences and current expertise along with their presently held positions in the company.
More importantly, you need to define the specific roles of these workers as they apply to the migration and constantly evaluate the value they’re contributing to the migration project, making changes to their roles as the dynamics of the migration dictate. For example, besides having a corporate employee deemed project manager and the consultant team’s main conduit into the business via a PMO, functional teams should be created along technology lines whose managers interact as they see fit with the consultants and the PMO.

As the migration continues and requirements change, you need to alter your migration team as well. Data center moves can take years – expect changes and act dynamically. Your business needs to put people in the know in positions of power and in direct communication with the consultants running the move.

Remember the Hubble Telescope implementation? The original lens that was installed with the telescope had been created with the wrong dimensions. The instrument was useless until a team could go back into space and replace the faulty lens. Take that lesson to heart. If the Hubble project team can make such a tremendous blunder, don’t think that your move team can’t. Be vigilant.

It would be easy to rely on the existence of an enterprise CMDB as well as a mature change management system to guarantee as smooth a migration as possible. Certainly, organizations that have already put these two disciplines in place are miles ahead of those who haven’t when it comes to pre-migration preparedness.

But because of the extreme nature and uniqueness of a migration and the fact that the tools of your infrastructure, like change management, were developed in a static environment per se, to rely blindly on configuration management without a special verification certification of some sort is tantamount to bailing out of a plane without inspecting your own parachute.

A successful data center migration is only as strong as its weakest link.  Therefore, it’s important that corporate leadership monitors the process from inception to completion.  Consulting firms will add the migration specific expertise, the tools and the extra manpower as needed. But the project will be a success to the extent that the project leaders put the in-house experts in their positions of specialization and make it their priority to contribute to and follow the project status like their jobs depended on it - they do, as well as the future of the business.