If you're an IT operations manager and you're getting ready to plan your first data center move, there are a few things you need to be prepared for. Unfortunately, when you're immersed in the details of the planning, it's easy to lose sight of some things. Here are a couple of key things to remember as you're planning for your data center move.
Don't Divide Your Focus
Data center moves are large-scale projects. With the equipment, infrastructure, and data preservation required, you shouldn't try to divide your focus. Don't try to handle multiple projects at once. Instead, focus on the data center move first, then approach your next migration project. That way, you can give the data center move the attention it needs and avoid making careless mistakes because you're distracted with other responsibilities.
Make Sure You Have A Solid Plan
Trying to complete a data center move without a complete start-to-finish plan is a recipe for disaster. Make sure that you allow plenty of time for the planning phase before you try to move your equipment or migrate any data. The better prepared you are, the easier the entire process is likely to be.
Remember that part of your planning process should also include contingency planning. Take time to consider what could go wrong, what issues you might encounter, and what unexpected hazards could potentially come up. Once you identify these, develop a plan to handle each one of them so your move isn't derailed by an issue. You can simply implement your contingency plan and keep rolling.
Always Create A Full Inventory Before The Migration
Before you move anything or even create your new infrastructure plan, you need to know exactly what you're working with. That's also the only way that you can be sure that you've moved everything and nothing was lost or corrupted in the process.
Create a comprehensive inventory that includes everything in your data center. That means all of the servers, connections, storage drives, applications, and anything else that's used in the center. Once the move is done, go through that inventory and make sure that everything is both accounted for and functional.
Remember That The Data Is As Important As The Hardware
When you have departmental division and data that's isolated for each department, it's easy to lose focus on the data preservation itself. You might think it will fall to each of the department heads to manage their own data, but this isn't the case. As the data center manager, you need to make sure that all of the data is backed up, preferably to a cloud-based server.