The most feared problems when migrating from data center to IDC data center

1. Introduction

When an enterprise wants to change its office address, the most troublesome problem is to relocate the data center. The relocation of a data center is not as simple as moving a house. Whether the relocation can be smooth will become a key factor in ensuring the continuity of the enterprise's business. The selection process of the IDC data center will revolve around the variables that best suit the environment. How to define needs, choose a suitable IDC provider, and negotiate the details of the actual migration to the new space all need to be strictly evaluated. Let's take a look at the precautions for migrating from a pre-installed data center to an IDC data center.

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2. Common Problems in Data Center Migration

(1) Unclear leadership

The most common mistake during the planning phase is failing to establish clear leadership. This means identifying who is responsible for clear communication and leading the team at each stage of the migration process. In a single department, the default is to adopt a leadership style that represents their best interests. This project leader must be fair and impartial, and he needs to understand and accurately reflect each team's goals and success criteria. This person must also have the required executive authority and communication skills to keep everyone committed to the same goal.

(2) Lack of a complete infrastructure assessment

The most common mistake during the discovery process is the lack of a complete infrastructure assessment. In particular, documentation for each rack and each device and its associated applications. This assessment should take note of everything, including physical and virtual devices, network devices, network topology, etc. Don't take shortcuts and migrate too much information just because you don't have these devices.

Tip: Include an assessment of business and technical interdependencies. For example, dependent applications such as application, network and database servers must be migrated as a package.

(3) Underestimating migration time

A common mistake during the actual migration process is not setting realistic time expectations. Production migrations are inherently slower than test migrations because they require more care and attention to detail.

Tip: Use a test migration to estimate actual migration time. You'll be surprised how long some applications take. Don't expect the migration process to wait.

(4) Set it up and forget about it

The most common mistake in managing a new infrastructure is to have a "set it (virtually) and forget it" mentality. Everyone is excited and eager to start the migration right away. This is the time to ensure that both the technology and the business are on the right track without missing any details.

Tip: After completing your migration, spend at least some time on proactive monitoring and support within 48 hours.

(5) Considering the mission accomplished

The most common mistake during the scale phase is to think you are done now and lose momentum, which can take a long time to get past the point where the enterprise sets annual plans, maintains quarterly reviews, and develops plans for ad hoc infrastructure needs.

You have just invested a lot of time, energy, and money into a difficult process. Don’t lose momentum or stop paying attention to the details now that the migration is over. This is not the only model for data center migrations, and these are certainly not the only mistakes people make. There will be others. The most important thing here is that in the process of constantly updating, your technology, operational requirements, and experience are changing.

3. Migrate the pre-built data center to the IDC data center, several key points to note

(1) Location (physical location and location of IT staff)

Just like choosing a house in the real estate market, site selection is always the most important. For IDC providers, site selection means the resources that can be provided in the area, and the location has a great impact on the security and good availability of data center assets. Consideration should be given to local climate (floods, extreme temperature fluctuations, storm frequency and intensity), earthquake history, and the availability of key infrastructure (such as lines, roads, and airports). For industries that must comply with regulations more strictly (such as the financial industry), it may be prohibited to provide customers with services to store data in international or even national borders.

The same principle applies to support staff. Whether you retain your own staff or have the IDC provider provide staffing, you need to understand the IDC's staffing arrangements. While some IDC tenants can still retain on-site IT staff, others outsource it completely as part of the contract. Before taking the next step, it is a pertinent suggestion for customers who rent IDC space to develop a scorecard of testing procedures based on their own situation in order to minimize potential suppliers.

(2) Cooling system operation status

After obtaining a fixed power source, a cooling system is essential in the IDC space. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is crucial in optimizing cooling costs and efficiency. PUE can show how much expenditure is related to the power delivered to the rack. Ideally, tenants only need to multiply the power consumption (metered) by the PUE factor to indicate the additional power required for cooling. Look for IDCs that use hybrid cooling technology (for example, using free cooling) to ensure redundancy of the cooling system.

(3) Having DCIM software

Although DCIM software has become the standard for managing data centers, not all IDC providers can provide complete technical support. Because data centers have historically had a lot of dedicated equipment, these devices have a lot of complex technologies, and managing these technologies may be problematic. Usually, the equipment has management software, but individual software systems may not be compatible or integrated. This will lead to chaos in the data center. So make sure that the IDC provider has DCIM software. Understand whether all the systems in the data center are interconnected? Are all sensors connected to and monitored by the software? Can they dynamically generate dashboards and reports and quickly move to the site, cabinet and rack level? Do they have end-to-end asset management capabilities? Have they integrated into other ITSM systems (IT service management systems) and enabled you to take advantage of the features you need most?

(4) Physical security status

No bank can operate without tight security for its financial assets. The same is true for data center assets, which may only contain the most valuable asset outside of human capital. For facilities that truly need security, insist on an in-house security team. When analyzing security models, be sure to evaluate in-house security personnel, layered security zones, cameras, and security systems that provide 360-degree coverage and have advanced security certifications such as PCI DSS 2.0, SSAE 16, and ISO 27002.

(5) Power supply

Power is both a broad and narrow issue. At a macro level, consider the stability and redundancy of the regional grid infrastructure. Look for the distance and location of power stations, substations, and cables to the data center, as well as redundancy considerations for the entire distribution system. Make sure no power restrictions will affect the operation of the IDC area. This may sound far-fetched, but if you have experienced power outages, or power outages during peak or seasonal supply, you will not think so. Don't forget to understand the recent local power outage and maintenance records so that you can develop corresponding contingency plans.

At a micro level, power monitoring within the IDC space needs to be considered. Do they accurately quantify metered power, and do they have the flexibility to increase or decrease power consumption over time to get a clear picture of how power is being used? Do they have a way to detect, monitor, and mitigate power surges and other anomalies? What are their backup and disaster recovery plans for when power outages occur in a colocation facility that is not tied to an external power source? All of this needs to be carefully considered.

(6) Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Providing visibility and management tools to tenants through clear SLAs is the cornerstone of a good ongoing relationship and proactively avoids conflicts. When choosing the right hosting provider, it is critical to create or have a good SLA and establish clear demarcation lines. Typically, SLAs can be tailored to specific tenant needs and the assets being hosted. This means identifying critical workloads, applications, servers, etc.

It emphasizes that when you pay for a data center IDC, you are buying critical infrastructure and ongoing maintenance, and you want to make sure that the SLA includes maintenance and testing. Look for documented MOPs (procedural methods) and SOPs (standard operating procedures) that are constantly used and improved. Also make sure they include good management tools to monitor power, cooling, rack conditions, environments with regular uptime and status reports, and provide log aggregation tools to collect various server, system and security logs for analysis. In this way, valuable time can be spent on identifying and solving potential problems instead of blaming each other.

(7) Workload and workflow management

After examining all the physical factors, it’s time to focus on how workloads are delivered and how workflows are managed. There are several key considerations regarding the type of data or applications your organization is trying to deliver through your data center. Cloud and big data will continue to evolve and change how organizations distribute data, especially when information is distributed between multiple locations. Information can now be delivered more efficiently and quickly than ever before. The IT landscape is being shaped by important shifts such as “data on demand,” BYOD (bring your own device), and the Internet of Things (IoT). So you want to ensure that your managed service provider is not only on-premises, but is also able to keep doing so, so it doesn’t make your data center management obsolete faster than your applications.

Likewise, balancing workloads, continuity, and disaster recovery is critical to sustainability. The distance that data must travel and the amount of bandwidth provided by a hosting provider can mean the difference between a great user experience and a failed hosting deployment. Whether or how good their workflow management systems are can help prioritize the delivery of certain data and infrastructure components. Additionally, it will help determine which needs have higher uptime requirements compared to lower priority applications. In the event of a bottleneck or emergency, you will be able to access the most important information first.

4. Risks and Countermeasures of Migrating Pre-installed Data Centers to IDC Data Centers

(1) Risk 1: Service Availability

The primary purpose of a data center is to host and run applications that provide services to the business. Whenever you consider migrating from one data center to another, you must first consider the availability of the underlying services. These services include infrastructure applications such as Active Directory and customer-facing applications such as SAP.

When services are moved from one data center to another, you must develop a strategy that takes into account when specific services are moved and the dependencies of applications on each other. A common approach to ensuring service availability is to create migration groups and group interdependent applications into the same group.

For services that support most enterprise applications, such as Active Directory and DNS, a common approach is to extend these core services across data centers. The services remain in both data centers until the migration is complete.

(2) Risk 2: Data Migration

Migrating application data from one location to another can be one of the most complex aspects of a data center migration project. A simple solution is to perform a tape- or hard-disk-based backup and restore. However, similar to a horizontal migration, backup and restore provide limited capabilities in terms of timely restoration of service. In addition, backup and restore is not the ideal method for data migration - it is more suitable for disaster recovery scenarios where data recovery options are limited.

The primary method of choice for most data migrations is to configure a leased line. If a dedicated connection is available between the two data centers, the migration team can take advantage of hardware- or software-based synchronization mechanisms to perform data migrations. In addition to being able to migrate data, this method can also be used to perform P2P migrations, P2V migrations, and virtual machine to virtual machine (V2V) migrations.

Many enterprises decide to have multiple connections between two data centers. The connection needs at least two lines: one connection to support the usual end-user and data center to data center traffic, in order to support applications such as Active Directory and application to application traffic; the second, usually faster connection is used to perform data synchronization. The two-way connection prevents the two completely different traffic from interfering or affecting each other.

(3) Risk 3: Hardware Migration

There are two common strategies for migrating physical servers: one is called "lift and shift," in which the hardware is put on a moving truck and installed in a new data center, and the other is called data replication. The system is backed up before moving to the new location, but this strategy carries some risks.

One of the biggest risks is that the physical server may be damaged during transportation, which can render the backup useless. Another challenge is that the two data centers are too far apart, so this approach is not realistic and cannot guarantee that the service will be available within an acceptable period of time.

The second strategy is to migrate data over a leased line. Leased lines bring two sub-swing hardware options. One option is to perform a physical-to-physical (P2P) migration. P2P migration requires the purchase of similar hardware so that the applications and hardware of the original data center can be migrated over while ensuring the shortest downtime.

Another hardware migration solution is physical to virtual (P2V) conversion. P2V requires converting a physical machine to a virtual machine via a leased line.

P2V aims to achieve two goals:

• The first goal is to migrate workloads from one data center to another while keeping hardware costs to a minimum.
• The second goal is to transform the data center by moving to a virtual platform. P2V migration is a popular option because many engineers are already accustomed to performing this conversion as part of previous data center projects.

V. Conclusion

Migrating your data center to an IDC can be critical to your business. Think twice before you act and be sure to consider the key factors, considerations, and risks listed above. Remember, all hosting providers are not the same. The better you choose the best hosting provider, the more value and peace of mind you will get from the migration.