Achieve a Flawless Cross-Country Migration against a Non-Negotiable Timeline

The Challenge

Our client is a nationally known multi-billion dollar homebuilder who faced a data center lease expiration – a “wrecking ball” event – moving from the East Coast to space in its Pacific time zone colocation facility. During the migration effort, they continued to explore a longer-term solution elsewhere in the United States, and selected a second facility for DR and, potentially, shared production. The client-estimated inventory included 160 application workloads running on approximately 500 virtual servers.

When GTSG signed on, there were only 18 weeks – 90 business days – before the client’s immovable deadline- which they described as a “Y2K event.”

GTSG Solution Description 

Using our GTSG Data Center Strategy and Migration offering, GTSG the Asset Inventory, Application Affinity Mapping, Migration Strategy Development, Detailed Migration Planning, and Execution phases of the project.  Tasks included:

  • Needs analysis and data collection
  • Inventory Audit and Asset Discovery
  • Validation and remediation of infrastructure and application inventory
  • Current State Assessment
  • FireScope-based Application Affinity Mapping
  • Migration Strategy Development for each Move Group identified
  • Detailed Migration Planning
  • Migration Execution Oversight and Assistance utilizing a GTSG-developed series of disciplines we call Migration Control Sequence (MCS), or sometimes “T-minus”

Client Benfits

GTSG helped our client achieve what they had seen as challenging, if not unlikely: an on-time, on-budget move. Specifically, we

  • Identified significant procedural and dependency errors made before our engagement
  • Verified that most of their business-critical move groups were correctly, if conservatively, constructed
  • Helped to divide less critical move groups into more manageable sizes through FireScope data and App Decomp interviews
  • Applied our history and expertise to avoid unexpected or elongated outages by:
    • Implementing pre- and post-migration freeze periods
    • Developing backout plans and adding them to change approval criteria
    • Pre-staging and peer-reviewing critical details such as DNS, network, and firewall changes that could not be put into production until the night of an event
    • Preconfiguring network, firewall, and load balancer changes where possible on new or unused segments
  • Provided FireScope and App Decomp data to assist in troubleshooting in the few instances where move night issues did occur

These activities were completed nearly four weeks before their “drop-dead” date allowing plenty of time for monitoring and stabilization.

At the conclusion of the engagement, our client realized previously un-attainable accuracy in their asset inventory repository as well as confirmed mappings of dependencies between applications and between applications and inventory components.

The bottom line: minimal – and for many Move Events – near-zero disruption.