Split the Data Center to Achieve Geographic Separation: Fortune 100 Strategy and Migration Achieved in 18 Months

Project Description and Requirements

After the events of September 11, 2001, the leadership at our client decided that it wanted to protect its business with a split of the business application portfolio and geographic separation of their primary data center located in New Jersey.

Recognizing that their staff already had full time responsibilities and had no prior experience with a program of this size and scope, our client sought outside expertise to assist with the design of a future state data center strategy, site selection, process development, migration support, implementation and stabilization.

GTSG Solution Description

GTSG leveraged the full breadth of our Data Center Strategy and Migration offering to establish itself as the leaders of the project and executed the following key services:

Provide leadership and technical direction to the build the strategy, including the development of guiding principles, conceptual design, modeling of decision alternatives, SWOT
Provided leadership and technical direction for the detailed design, including application decomposition, dependency and affinity analysis, enabling exceptionally detailed implementation project plans, at the level of server-by-server move This undertaking represented the full lifecycle of our Data Center Strategy Framework
Assumed leadership of a multi-vendor services team and the Our client’s business and technical leadership team to plan and execute the data center
Provided operational and service catalog process and procedure development to enable dynamic operations from either production
Provided migration and implementation
Participated in site selection analysis, refurbish requirements, resiliency, labor force, and other requirements
Developed new disaster recovery procedures based upon stated goals for reciprocal recovery and non- disruptive DR testing at the application and data center level

Client Results and Benefits

As a result of the services provided by GTSG, our client realized the following benefits:

Selected and refurbished a target data center in Georgia
Achieved migration dates per plan, in twenty-two months from RFP award to ribbon cutting in the new
Achieved a split of production workloads to minimize the risk to the business application portfolio
Implemented a reciprocal recovery model: not active/active, but a model that enabled failover at the application or data center level via a controlled disaster Our client operated with two different command centers alternating primary control, validating disaster preparedness on an ongoing basis.
Implemented a non-disruptive DR design, wherein the failover of a center or an app can be tested while running
Implemented an isolated network with which to access the DR network, accessible only through VPN: there was no risk of mistaking the DR system for live