Dear reader,
The purpose of this post (and this series for that matter) is to recount some lessons learned while I worked in a project to migrate our data center from an Internally Hosted facility to a third-party provider one.
I'll break this story in 3 main parts:
- My Data Center Migration Rant
- How We Chose to Implement the Data Center Move", and
- If I had to do it all over again I would...
I did not want to move our Data Center (we were doing fine where we were). I did not want to move our Data Center (there was no hard-evidence that it was cost effective). I did not want to move our Data Center (our applications were not tested for having users and servers separated by several 1000's of miles). I did not want to move our Data Center... and on and on and on... you get the picture. I just did not want to move our Data Center. Period!
Then it happened. My boss asked me to pitch in and gave me a few good reasons of why to try this one. The first thing I had to do was to let go of my attitude towards this. I had to take my emotions out of the equation. It was not always easy to do it. We had been hosting our own data center very efficiently, and cost effectively. The problem was that we were dealing with a much larger organization (we were purchased by a bigger player) and many of our technical directions and choices were "being made for us."
There is something defective with a centralized way of governing when someone 100s of miles away somehow seems to know exactly what your needs are and how to meet them without ever consulting with you. One day you come to work and "puff!" many choices have been made for your own good. I must admit, in my personal experience with this Data Center migration project, that was the toughest part to swallow about the whole deal. Over time I got better at checking my personal issues at the door and figure out how to make things work despite the "command and control" entities from afar.
As you can tell, even though I checked my attitude at the door, I always made sure I picked it up as went home each night. Otherwise, I would not have felt compelled to write this up and share with others out there.
The next installment of this series deals with "How we chose to Implement the Data Center Move". Here is an outline of that in order to provide a preview of what is coming next:
- Organization of the Project (SharePoint helped quite a bit!)
- Cleanup Activities and Architectures
- Generating a "winning team" attitude
- Dealing with our new hosts
- Building the environment
- Scheduling Testing
- Scheduling User Acceptance
- Launch Day
- Dealing with the fallout
- Setting up the Disaster Recovery
The last installment of this 3 part series deals with some lessons learned and posting of some SharePoint templates. I twitted a long time ago about the SharePoint angle and there were some interested parties. So I've got to deliver on that promise.
More to come on this. Please, stay tuned! Next part...
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