data center

What Is Your Strategy for Relocating a Data Center Successfully?

Due to the rapidly evolving technology and new business-based needs, more and more businesses worldwide are migrating their data centers. They do so to acquire new business models, opportunities, and tools to grow their business by changing their working environment.

Relocating your data center isn’t something you can do with the snap of the fingers, as it requires a thought-out strategy and an effective execution process. Even though it may seem like moving to a new apartment at first, relocating a data center successfully involves a lot of time, patience, and organization.

Getting everything ready for relocating your data center is necessary if you want everything to go smoothly. You can use this article as a step-by-step guide to learning how to manage a successful data center relocation.

A goal without a plan is just a wish

If you’ve decided that your company is ready to take the next step and expand its capacity, it’s best to spend a little more time organizing everything. Without a good plan, your data center relocation can end up as one of the good ideas that never came to life due to poor planning.

The best way to plan your data center relocation is to create a task list that can help you monitor everything you need to do. The task list can cover everything from refactoring applications, backing up drives, and transferring network-based data to finding the best way to transport your hardware to a new location.

Planning a data center exit strategy may take up to 90% of the time and effort for the overall relocation process, hence it’s critical to seek assistance from migration experts who go into details and make everything ready for migrating a data center successfully.

Prepare your team for the data center relocation

It’s hard to relocate a data center all by yourself. You need a team of experienced and well-trained individuals to help you thoroughly. The result of your data center relocation can majorly depend on the team standing behind you.

Preparing your team is one of the elements of planning a successful data center migration. If every person in your team knows their responsibilities and tasks, you are less likely to fail to migrate your data, and you can even bring additional experience for your teammates.

Ensure that you work with a Project Manager who can carry out the whole plan and give you more space to think about other things. Try to hand out more challenging responsibilities to more experienced workers if you want the relocation to go according to plan.

Find the Best Relocation Strategy

Once you’ve set the task lists and given out the responsibilities, now’s the time to start looking for a location and the strategy that will work the best for your plan. Here are three of the most basic approaches to data center relocation you can choose from.

Bing Bang Database Relocation

This strategy relies on transferring your data center information at a particular time, all at once. Companies that use this strategy may often decide to do so during the weekend and other non-working hours.

Even though it seems like the easiest way to migrate your data center, don’t forget that this strategy isn’t for businesses that function 24/7. It can be risky, but it can also be very effective for companies that have the time for this method.

Trickle Database Strategy

The trickle database strategy functions by breaking down migration into smaller sub-migrations, allowing your team to confirm the success of every phase and have a more detailed insight into what is and what isn’t working out.

That way, you can improve your additional sequence runs without having to start the whole process over again from the start. The downside to this strategy is that it can take up a lot of time, but it can be helpful.

Zero-Downtime Database Migration

This migration strategy can help you access the database while it’s migrating. You can also operate with the source database with zero downtime. Other than experiencing less disruption, you may also save time and money along the way.

Map and Evaluate the Relocation Destination

Evaluating destination options is also one of the conditions you need to fulfill if you want your data center relocation to be successful. Your future data center database must meet the same requirements as the current one, so ensure that your teammates are aware of that.

Besides, source and target databases must have the same resources, specifications, options, connectivity, and security requirements. If not, you will more likely stumble on different problems that can make data center relocation challenging.

Once you transfer your database, the smartest thing to do is to compare the current database with the previous one, ensuring that there are no fundamental differences. From there on, you can start working on innovative approaches for your business and enjoy the new environment.

Conclusion

 

Finding the best data center relocation method is necessary if you want your teammates to successfully manage a new database and create room for your business to develop in many innovative ways. 

Planning every detail is crucial, as it can prepare you for everything you may experience during the data center migration processes. Therefore, the best way to deal with unexpected problems is to plan everything and think of every problem that could emerge.