Data Center Relocation: Tips For Success

Following a detailed DCR methodology. This walks you through the details, deliverables, steps, and signoffs before, during, and after the actual move.

Strong executive sponsorship. DCR requires an internal champion who can help the team surmount political, operational, or budgetary challenges.

Getting the right people. Success requires a seasoned DCR project manager and a dedicated DCR team. DCR may also require backfilling or reassigning key infrastructure positions. It also involves connecting disparate teams together: application owners, infrastructure teams, external vendors, and end users.

Take time for application discovery. A large portion of your planning should surround application and environment discovery. This includes quantitative work (i.e., use of third-party discovery tools). It also includes significant qualitative work (i.e., interviews with application owners and end users). This will reveal many dependencies you need to consider.

Identify and bundle. Your discovery work should unearth dependencies and relationships between applications, their underlying databases, and infrastructure elements. It's often best to bundle and move these interdependent elements together, especially if separating them risks unexpected downtime. Consider using a bundling algorithm that tracks and schedules these elements together.

Virtual migrations. This is the least disruptive method, involving point-and-click migration of virtual servers already running in the environment. For many virtual server environments, this method may cover as much as 50% of the applications moved. With added optimization work on the virtual environment, this can grow to as much as 65% application coverage. (One caveat: This method works best in VMware hypervisor environments based on the Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system.)

Pick up and ship. This is the most disruptive method. It involves shutting down, moving, and restarting the physical server(s) at the new data center. It is best suited for low-risk applications.

Shut down and restore. This is another method that involves restoring the operating system on to new or repurposed hardware. It is well suited for physical servers and other (non-VMware-based) virtual server environments with longer downtime windows.

Application failover. This method involves failing over the application database to the new data center. It is used as an adjunct to one of the other methods, since it does not involve moving the application servers themselves. This method uses an application-upgrade approach and benefits from minimal downtime.