Management guide: Data centre migration (Part 2)

Inertia is a strong force, and the desire to avoid tinkering with working environments keeps many companies lumbering along with data centres that are too small, too expensive, too inefficient, and just plain too far behind the curve to suit their current needs

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theplanetdotcom/ (Creative Commons)

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theplanetdotcom/ (Creative Commons)

The migration has reduced power consumption by around 17 per cent and has been an “ongoing learning process”, Power adds, particularly as the organisation learns which types of workloads require which configurations of hardware. For example, many high-end enterprise customers require more computing power but less RAM, while an SME or small IT house may want “hugely dense RAM”.

“When you start taking it out to a broader customer base, you just don’t know what someone’s going to do with their equipment or virtual server,” he explains.

“You can fit high numbers of server VMs in racks, rather than virtual desktops that are effectively in use all the time. We’re still learning how the customer profiles fit equipment differently.”

This latest wave of data centre migrations involves many lessons, and there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy by any means.

Consensus suggests it’s critical to work with implementation and migration partners to develop correlations between computing power and the cost of power and cooling, while the new ‘everything’s mission-critical’ paradigm has added new urgency to redundant equipment and data centres with two or more of everything.

“People are starting to think of the data centre as more than just technology and function,” says Dimension Data’s Hanrahan. “We’re seeing integrated designs take place across physical layers, grey and white space, storage, compute, and apps, and all the way up.”

Companies recognise that in order to satisfy actual physical designs, they’re having to map their virtualisation over five years.

There are still some deficiencies: Industry figures point to still-evolving management paradigms as a key area, for example. Yet these changes aren’t new, and the ever-smarter integration of virtual server management into enterprise management platforms is rapidly closing those gaps.

Yet as enterprises are rapidly learning, the promised benefits of migration are there for the taking, even if they’re long-term benefits rather than short-term.

If you can plan on a long timeframe your migration is likely to not only cut costs and provide necessary headroom in the near term, but will enable a more flexible, responsive and cost-effective data infrastructure in the future.

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