Business Challenge
When a leading cable service provider's parent company decided to relocate its data center half-way across the country, its director of computer services was suddenly charged with moving a high availability environment in a short time-frame. The director knew the IT organization would need expert help.
Solution
Forsythe’s data center relocation practice began by inquiring about what different business functions the customer’s data center supported. Then Forsythe and the customer performed an audit and assessment of the data center’s physical assets including how each asset is used to support the business, and how the assets are linked together. Based upon the findings, Forsythe constructed a plan to move groups of linked assets in discrete units, and evaluated the business case for each unit. Some units could afford a 24-48 hour outage; some needed to be running again within eight hours; some would require seamless cutover.
To support the third group of linked assets, Forsythe supplied short-term rental equipment as asset swaps to the new data center location. For the no-downtime equipment groups, systems were deployed in the new data center and linked real-time to the old data center, awaiting cutover. To minimize costs, units that could tolerate downtime were air-freighted or ground-shipped, depending on the time window. Forsythe worked with the manufacturers throughout to ensure that all licenses and maintenance contracts would remain in place. This array of services met the customer’s availability needs and budget with “just in case” assurance.
In addition, because much of the customer’s data center staff chose not to relocate, Forsythe became the subject matter experts and were engaged to perform knowledge transfer to the staff the new location.
Results
The data center relocation was completed without any interruption to the customer’s business; it was able to fully honor its service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers. The move was a "non-event."
As a side-benefit, because a data center relocation is essentially a planned disaster recovery, the move represents a successfully-performed disaster recovery test that could be approved by auditors.
Furthermore, because the assessment for and planning of the relocation required complete asset identification, evaluation, and tracking, the customer now has a much clearer picture of its data center assets, and is prepared to implement asset management. In addition, with this clearer picture in place, Forsythe was able to help them realign their maintenance contracts with the different levels of support their various equipment requires, so they would neither be under-supported nor overpaying.
Even more important, in helping the customer document and understand how to recover their systems, Forsythe helped them develop best processes documentation for start-up and shut-off of their five categories of equipment groups.
