Consolidate Three Data Centers into One After Years of Acquisition, Confident In Your Data for the First Time

The Challenge

Our client planned to consolidate and relocate nine mission-critical applications spread across what they believed to be 85-100 servers from their existing data centers in three cities into a single new data center. Having grown by acquisition with minimal systems consolidation, client leadership needed a deeper understanding of application dependencies, risk items, and risk mitigation.

GTSG Solution Description

Executing against our Workload Migration Methodology and Approach, the GTSG team provided skilled resources and best practices to assist our client. The approach included the following structured phases performed under an overall governance and project management umbrella:

• Inventory Audit and Asset Discovery
• Application Affinity Mapping and Analysis
• Migration Strategy Development

Client Benefits

GTSG provided a Migration Planning and Strategy document that included:

• Authoritative inventory and affinity mapping of the nine primary applications and 55 infrastructure servers needed to facilitate successful data center relocations, as well as
• Authoritative identification of 25-30 servers that could be decommissioned due to consolidation or end of life
• Four options for Move Group creation and associated Migration Alternatives around the most mission-critical applications
• Point of Departure diagrams and documents detailing the make-up and business use of each major application
• An overall review and recommendations for during- and post-migration adjustments to existing backup procedures

The bottom line: Our client now had the detailed information needed to make decisions and commitments moving forward with a Workload Placement Strategy and into Data Center Consolidation.