New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 10/17/06

One of the strongest trends we have found in our research is consolidation. Companies are consolidating data centers and consolidating servers and storage within data centers.

With all this consolidation, you might think that new data center construction is in a slump. And you’d be wrong.

In fact, the companies most aggressively consolidating data centers are also building new facilities. Since most data centers were built in the pre-blade-server '90s, they are not usually equipped for high-density racks and the concomitant power and cooling requirements. Many companies are moving from old data centers into newly built facilities with better power and cooling capacity.

That brings up an interesting question: How do you go about “moving in” to a new data center?

Moving from an old data center to a new facility must be one of the more stressful IT jobs. Clearly, a lot of planning will need to go into such a move. Here are some questions and issues to consider:

• Plan A, Plan B and Plan C - A project such as this will require plenty of planning. A lot will depend on who you select to put in charge of this project. A data center move will require project planning, technical and organizational skills of the highest degree. It will require lots and lots of planning for all eventualities.
  
• Knowing what’s there - Before you begin planning the move, you will need to know what is currently housed in your data center. That is a question few companies can answer with certainty: unless you have up-to-date inventories and a very strict change-management policy, there will be servers, applications and dependencies no one knows about. One possible solution is to use network flow-monitoring tools to get an inventory of applications “as-seen” rather than “as-documented.”
  
• Opportunity for change - Is this a great opportunity to redesign your data center? Why not start fresh, now that you have a clean slate? IT executives we have interviewed consider this a very bad idea. You should only change one “variable” at a time. The move is going to be painful enough without combining it with massive change. Instead, try to keep everything stable for a period of time before the move - a “status-freeze.”
  
• Moving stuff vs. buying new stuff - Another possible strategy would be to equip the new data center with all new equipment. The move could be made to coincide with a lease-refresh cycle on the equipment, allowing you to get all the new equipment delivered to the new data center. While this is a tempting approach, it introduces significant changes at a time when you want stability (see previous point).
  

What are your experiences with data center moves? Have you found one strategy to be more or less successful than others? Do you have any words of advice or caution to share? Please contact me and let me know. We will revisit this topic and publish some anonymized stories from the field.