Showing posts with label Data center migration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Data center migration. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Discover Case Study: Health Care Giant McKesson Harnesses HP ALM for Data Center Transformation and Dev-Ops Performance Improvement

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

We're now going to focus on McKesson Corp., and how they're improving their operations and reducing their mean time to resolution. We'll also explore applications quality assurance, test, and development, and how they're progressing toward a modernization front on those efforts as well.

We might even get into a bit of how these come together for an application lifecycle management and dev-ops benefit. Here to help us understand these issues better -- and their experience and success -- is Andy Smith, Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Welcome, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Welcome, Doug.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics.



Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: First, we might want to get people familiar, if they are not already, with McKesson. Andy Smith, tell us a little bit about McKesson, the type of organization you are, and the extent. It’s quite a large organization you have for IT activities there as well.

Andy Smith: McKesson is a Fortune 15 healthcare company primarily in three areas: nurse call centers, medical pharmaceutical distribution, and a healthcare software development company.

Gardner: And, you have a very large and distributed IT organization. I've heard about it before, but let’s go through that a little bit again if you don’t mind.

Andy Smith: It’s a very federated model. Each business unit has its own IT department responsible for the applications, and in some cases, their own individual data centers. Through Doug’s data center transformation program, we've been migrating those data centers into fewer corporate locations, and I'm responsible for running the infrastructure in those corporate locations.

Gardner: Andy, tell us about what you've been doing in order to get to faster time to market for your services, meeting your service level agreement (SLA) obligations internally, and how you reduce your meantime to resolution. What’s been the story there?

Improving processes

Andy Smith: What we've been doing over a little more than two years is improving our processes into ITIL v3. We focused heavily on change management, event management, and configuration management. At the same time, in parallel, we introduced the HP Tool Suite, for monitoring and configuration management, asset management, and automation.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics. We've seen a drop in our Tier 1 outages of 54 percent during the last couple of years, as we implemented this tool. We've got three years worth of metrics now, and every year, the metrics have declined compared to the prior year. We've also seen an 86 percent drop in the breaches of those Tier 1 SLAs.

Gardner: That’s very impressive. Doug Smith, tell us what you've been doing with data center transformation and how you're working toward a higher level of quality with the test development and the upfront stages of applications?

Doug Smith: Well, Dana, we've been on this road of transformation now for about three and a half years. In the beginning, we focused on our production environments, which generally consist of fairly predictable workloads across multiple business units, and as Andy mentioned, quite a variety actually of models. In the past, the business units have obtained a great deal of autonomy in how they manage their infrastructure.

The first thing was to pull together the infrastructure and go through a consolidation exercise, as well as an optimization of that infrastructure. There we focused heavily on virtualization, as well as optimization of our storage environment, and to Andy’s point around process, heavily invested in process improvement.

We look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.



A couple of years into this, we began to look at our development environment. McKesson has several thousand developers globally, and these developers spread across multiple product sets in multiple countries.

If you think about our objectives around security, quality, and agility, we look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.

Gardner: So, it sounds as if both of you have relied increasingly on automation and integration and federation for many of the products that support these activities. Is there anything in particular, at a philosophical level, about why managing and governing across multiple products, but with governance or management capabilities is so important? Let’s start with you, Andy.

Andy Smith: When we first started looking at new tools, we recognized that we had a lot of point solutions that may have been best-in-breed, but they were a standalone solution. So, we weren’t getting the full benefits of the integration. As we looked at the next generation of tools, we wanted a tool suite that was fully integrated, so that the whole was better than the sum of the parts is probably the best way to put it.

We felt HP had progressed the farthest of all the competition in generating that full suite of tools to manage a data center environment. And, we believe we're seeing the benefits of that, because all these tools are working together to help improve our SLAs and shorten those mean time to restore.

Gardner: Doug Smith, any thoughts on that same level of the whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Governance in place

Doug Smith: Absolutely. It's not unique, but to a large business like McKesson, as a federation, we have businesses that retain their autonomy and their decision-making. The key is to have that governance in place to highlight the opportunity at an enterprise level to say that if we make the investments, if we coordinate our activities, and if we pull together, we actually can achieve outcomes greater than we could individually.

Gardner: Doug Smith, you've been using the application development function as a first step towards a larger data center transformation effort, and you've been an early adopter for that set of application.

At the same time, Andy Smith has been involved with trying to make operations run more smoothly. Do these come together? Is there a better ability to create an end-to-end process for development and operations and perhaps provide a feedback loop among and between them.

This is sort of dev-ops question. Andy Smith, how does that strike you? Is there something even greater, maybe perhaps a greater whole among the sum of even more parts?

Andy Smith: I believe so, because for the products that McKesson develops and sells to the healthcare industry, in many cases, we're also hosting them within our data centers as an application service provider.

I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.



And the bigger sum of the whole to me is the fact that I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.

Gardner: Doug Smith, thoughts on the same dev-ops benefit? How does that strike you?

Doug Smith: As you look across product groups and our ability to scale this, and with Andy’s capability that he is developing and delivering on, you really see an opportunity for a company like McKesson to continue to deliver on its mission to improve the health of the businesses that we serve in healthcare. And, we can all relate to the benefits of driving out cost and increasing efficiency in healthcare.

So, at the highest level, anything that we can do to facilitate a faster and more agile development process for the folks who are delivering software and services in our organization, as well as help them provide a foundation and a layer where then they can talk to each other and build additional services and value-added services for our customers on top of that layer, then we have something that really can have an impact for all of us.

Gardner: Well, very good. Thank you for sharing that. I want to thank our guests. We've been here talking about the benefits of better tools for operations, as well as application development and hosting, and sharing their experience has been Andy Smith. He is the Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Thanks so much, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Thank you, Doug.

Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation Journey

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on some fast-moving trends by addressing the need for data center transformation (DCT). We'll also identify some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

The pace of change, degrees of complexity, and explosion around the uses of new devices and increased data sources are placing new requirements and new strain on older data centers. Research shows that a majority of enterprises are either planning for or are in the midst of data center improvements and expansions.

Deciding how to best improve your data center however is not an easy equation. Those building new data centers need to contend with architectural shifts to cloud and hybrid infrastructure models, as well as the need to cut total cost and reduce energy consumption for the long-term.

An added requirement for new data centers is to satisfy the needs of both short-and long-term goals, by effectively jibing the need for agility now with facility decisions that may well impact the company for 20 years or more.

We are going to examine two ongoing HP workshops as a means for better understanding DCT and for accurately assessing a company’s maturity in order to know how to begin a DCT journey and where it should end up.

We're here with rather three HP experts on the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop and the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model Workshop. Please join me now in welcoming Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solution for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager at HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Network Business Unit. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Edelmann: Thank you, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: And also Mark Grindle, Business Consultant for Data Center Infrastructure Services and Technology Services in HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Grindle: Hi, Dana. Thanks a lot.

Gardner: Helen, as I mentioned, this is a very difficult situation for organizations. Lots of conflicting data is coming in, and many changes, many different trends are impacting this. Why don’t we try to set the stage a little bit for why DCT is so important, but also why it's no easy task.

Exciting times

Tang: Absolutely, Dana. As you said, there are a lot of difficulties for technology, but also if you look at the big picture, we live in extremely exciting times. We have rapidly changing and evolving business models, new technology advances like cloud, and a rapidly changing workforce.

What the world is demanding is essentially instant gratification. You can call it sort of an instant-on world, a world where everything is mobile, everybody is connected, interactive, and things just move very immediately and fluidly. All your customers and constituents want their need satisfied today, in an instant, as opposed to days or weeks. So, it takes a special kind of enterprise to do just that and compete in this world.

You need to be able to serve all of these customers, employees, partners, and citizens -- 0r if you happen to be a government organization -- with whatever they want or need instantly, any point, any time, through any channel. This is what HP is calling the Instant-On Enterprise, and we think it's the new imperative.

Gardner: When you say instant-on, it means that companies have to respond to their customers at almost lightning speed, but we are talking about infrastructures that can take years to build out. How do you jibe the two, the need to be instant, in terms of how you respond, but recognizing that this is a very difficult, complex, and timely process?

Tang: Therein lies the challenge. Your organization is demanding ever more from IT -- more innovation, faster time to market, more services -- but at the same time, you're being constrained by older architectures, inflexible siloed infrastructure that you may have inherited over the years. How do you deliver this new level of agility and be able to meet those needs?

You have to take a transformational approach and look at things like converged infrastructure as a foundation for moving your current data center to a future state that’s able to support all of this growth, with virtualized resource pools, integrated automated processes across the data center, with an energy-efficient future-proofed physical data center design, that’s able to flex and meet these needs.

Gardner: Of course, one of the larger trends too is that technology is just more important to more companies in more ways. This is not something you do just to support your employees. It really is core to most companies in how they actually conduct business, and is probably one of the chief determinants of their success.

So doing DCT is really part and parcel with how well you actually run your business -- or am I overstating it?

Tang: That’s absolutely true. We talked earlier about how being an Instant-On Enterprise is an imperative. Why do we call it that? Well, because these vast changes are coming, and you don’t have a choice.

If you look at just a few examples of some of these changes in the world of IT, number one is devices. I think you mentioned this earlier. There’s an explosion of devices being used: smartphones, laptops, TouchPads, PDAs. According to the Gartner Group, by 2014, that’s less than three years, 90 percent of organizations will need to support their corporate applications on personal devices. Is IT ready for that? Not by a long shot today.

Architecture shifts

Another trend that we see is some of these architecture shifts. Cloud obviously is very hot today, but two or three years ago a lot of CIOs pooh-poohed the idea and said, "Oh, that’s not real. That’s just hype." Well, the trend is really upon us.

Another Gartner stat: in the next four years, 43 percent of CIOs will have the majority of their IT infrastructure and organizations and apps running in the cloud or in some sort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. Most organizations aren’t equipped to deal with that.

Last but not least, look at your workforce. In less than 10 years about half of the workforce will be millennials, which is defined as people born between the year of 1981 and 2000 -- the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. This is a Forrester statistic.

This younger generation grew up with the Internet. They work and communicate very differently from the workforce of today and they will be a main constituency for IT in less than 10 years. That’s going to force all of us to adjust to different types of support expectations, different user experiences, and governance.

Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner.



Gardner: So, as we recognize that the workloads, the requirements placed on IT are shifting, the data center needs to respond to that as well. I guess it’s important to know where you are, how well you have done in adjusting to what you have been serving up in the last several years in order to know what you need to do in order to be able to provide for these new requirements that we are describing.

Let’s start talking about one of these first workshops. It’s about the Maturity Model, a better understanding of where you are. I guess there is an order to these workshops. This one seems to be in the right order. You have to know where you are before you can decide where to go.

So let’s move to Mark Edelmann. Tell me a little bit about the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and why it’s important, as I said, to know where you are before you start charting the course in any detail to the future.

Edelmann: Before we dive into the maturity model though, I recently bumped into a definition on Wikipedia about maturity and I thought it might be useful to consider your IT environment as you listen to this definition that I picked up.
"Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner. The response is generally learned rather than instinctive and is not determined by one’s age. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act appropriately according to the situation."
Now, that probably sounds a little bit like what you might want your infrastructure to behave like and to actually achieve a level of maturity, and that’s exactly what the Maturity Model Workshop is all about.

Overall assessment

The Maturity Model consists of an overall assessment, and it’s a very objective assessment. It’s based on roughly 60 questions that we go through to specifically address the various dimensions, or as we call them domains, of the maturity of an IT infrastructure.

We apply these questions in a consultative, interactive way with our customers, because some of the discussions can get very, very detailed. Asking these questions of many of our customers that have participated in these workshops has been a new experience. We're going to ask our customers things that they probably never thought about before or have only thought of in a very brief sort of a way, but it’s important to get to the bottom of some of these issues.

As a result of examining the infrastructure’s maturity along these lines, we're able to establish a baseline of the maturity of the infrastructure today. And, in the course of interviewing and discussing this with our customers, we also identify where they would like to be in terms of their maturity in the future. From that, we can put together a plan of how to get from here to there.

Gardner: When you say a workshop, are these set up so that people physically go there and you have them in different places, or is there a virtual version where people can participate regardless of where they are? How does that work?

Edelmann: We've found it’s much more valuable to sit down face to face with the customer and go through this, and it actually requires an investment of time. There’s a lot of background information that has to be gathered and so forth, and it seems best if we're face to face as we go through this and have the discussion that’s necessary to really tease out all the details.

The impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors.



Gardner: I'd like to understand a little bit more, Mark, why you break out maturity versus installed base. Help me understand what it takes in order to succeed and what you typically find with these companies? Do they find that they are further ahead than they thought or further behind when we look at this through that distinct lens of maturity?

Edelmann: Most of our customers find out that they are a lot further behind than they thought they were. It's not necessarily due to any fault on their part, but possibly a result of aging infrastructure, because of the economic situation we have been in, disparate siloed infrastructure as a result of building out application focused stacks, which was kind of the way we approached IT historically.

Also, the impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors and so forth. Rationalizing all that can leave them in kind of a disparate sort of a state. So, they usually find that they are a lot further behind than they thought.

Gardner: And, because you've been doing this for quite some time and you've been doing it around the world, you have a pretty good set of data. You have some good historical trend lines to examine, so you have certain domains and certain stages of maturity that you have been able to identify.

Maybe you could help us understand what those are and then relate how folks can then place themselves on those lines, not only to know where they are, but have a sense of how far it is they need to go to get to that higher level of maturity they're seeking.

Edelmann: Sure. We can talk through that level of detail and you can familiarize yourself, at least verbally, with how this model is set up and so forth.

4x5 matrix

Picture, if you will, a 4x5 matrix. We examine the customer’s infrastructure in four, what we call, domains. These domains consist of technology and architecture, management tools and processes, the culture and IT staff, and the demand, supply, and IT governance aspects of the infrastructure and the data center operations. Those are the four domains in which we ask these questions and make our assessment.

From that, as we go through this, through some very detailed analysis that we have done over the years, we're able to position the customer’s infrastructure in one of five stages:
  • The first stage, which is where most people start, is in Stage 1; we call that Compartmentalized and Legacy, which is rather essentially the least-mature stage.
  • From there we move to Stage 2, which we call Standardized.
  • Stage 3 then is Optimized.
  • Stage 4 gets us into Automated and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and,
  • Stage 5 is more or less IT utopia necessary to become the Instant-On Enterprise that Helen just talked about. We called that Adaptively Sourced Infrastructure.
We evaluate each domain under several conditions against those five stages and we essentially wind up with a baseline of where the customer stands.

We've been doing this for a while and we've done a lot of examinations across the world and across various industries. We have a database of roughly 1,400 customers that we then compare the customer’s maturity to. So, the customer can determine where they stand with regards to the overall norms of IT infrastructures.

It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.



We can also illustrate to the customer what the best-in-class behavior is, because right now, there aren’t a whole lot of infrastructures that are up at Stage 5. It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

Gardner: I want to make sure I've got this straight in terms of the order of these workshops and why how they play off of one another. Maybe, Helen, you could come back in and help understand which one you see people doing first and which one you think is the one that makes the more sense?

Tang: Both workshops are great. It's not really an either/or. I would start with the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, because that sets the scene in the background of how I start to approach this problem. What do I think about? What are the key areas of consideration? And, it maps out a strategy on a grander scale.

The CI Maturity Model Assessment specifically gets into when you think about implementation. Let's dive in and really drill deep into your current state versus future state when it comes to these five domains that Mark just described.

Gardner: Let's go now to the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop with Mark Grindle. First, do you share Helen’s perspective on the order, and what would people gain by entering into the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first? Then, you can then fill us in a little bit on what it's about?

Interesting workshop

Grindle: Thanks, Dana. I agree with what Helen said. It really is more structured if you do the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first and then follow that up with the Maturity Model. It's very interesting workshop, because it's very different from any other workshop, at least that I have ever participated in. It's not theoretical and it's also extremely interactive.

It was originally designed and set up based on HP IT’s internal transformation. So, it's based on exactly what we went through to accomplish all the great things that we did, and we've continued to refine and improve it based on our customer experiences too. So, it's a great representation of our internal experiences as well as what customers and other businesses and other industries are going through.

During the process, we walk the customer through everything that we've learned, a lot of best practices, a lot of our experiences, and it's extremely interactive.

Then, as we go through each one of our dimensions, or each one of the panels, we probe with the customer to discuss what resonates well with them, where they think they are in certain areas, and it's a very interactive dialog of what we've learned and know and what they've learned and know and what they want to achieve.

The outcome is typically a very robust document and conversation around how the customer should proceed with their own transformation, how they should sequence it, what their priorities are, and true deliverables -- here are the tasks you need to take on and accomplish -- either with our help or on their own.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.



It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

Gardner: And the same question to you, Mark Grindle, about location. Is this something you prefer to do face to face as Mark Edelmann mentioned, or is this something that people can gather virtually or through road shows? How does it actually come to the market?

Grindle: It absolutely has to be face-to-face. We use a very large conference room and we set up these panels around the room. Each one of these panels is floor to ceiling and height. There are about 4 feet by 5, or 5.5 feet high, and we walk through a series of 10 panels that approaches each of the dimensions of transformation, as we look at it.

So having all the people in the room and being able to be interactive face to face, as well as reference panels that you might have gone through or that you are about to go through as different points in the conversation come up, is critical to having a successful workshop.

Designed around strategy

It's definitely designed around strategy. Most people, when they look at transformation, think about their data centers, their servers, and somewhat their storage, but really the goal of our workshop is to help them understand, in a much more holistic view, that it's not just about that typical infrastructure. It has to do with program management, governance, the dramatic organizational change that goes on if you go through transformation.

Applications, the data, the business outcomes, all of this has to be tied in to to ensure that, at end of the day, you've implemented a very cost-effective solution that meets the needs of the businesses. That really is a game-changing type of move by your organization.

Gardner: And, as part of some of the trends we mentioned, building these for the long-term means that you're building for operational efficiency. The total cost, of course, over time is going to be that ongoing operational penalty or, if you do it right, perhaps payback. How do you help people appreciate the economics of the data center, and how important is that to people in these workshops?

Grindle: The financials are absolutely critical. There are very few businesses today that aren’t extremely focused on their bottom line and how they can reduce the operational cost.

Certainly, from the HP IT experience, we can show, although it's not a trivial investment to make this all happen, the returns are not only normally a lot larger than your investment, but they are year-over-year savings. That’s money that typically can be redeployed to areas that really impact the business, whether it's through manufacturing, marketing, or sales. This is money that can be reinvested in the business, and allowed to help grow the areas that really will have future impact on the growth of the business, while reducing the cost of your data centers and your operation.

Even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology.



Interestingly enough, what we find is that, even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology. You actually have to implement new technologies and robust technologies to help bring your cost down. Things like automations, operational efficiency, ITIL processes all help you drive the saving while you are allowed to upgrade your systems and your environments to current technologies and new technologies.

And, while we're on the topic of cost savings, a lot of times when we are talking to customer about transformation, it's normally being driven by some critical IT imperative, like they're out of space in their data center and they're about to look at building out a new data center or perhaps a obtaining a collocation site. A lot of times we find that we sit down and talk with them about how they can modernize their application, tier their storage, go with higher density equipment, virtualize their servers, they actually can free up space and avoid that major investment of the new data center.

Gardner: That gets back to the definition of maturity, where it might not necessarily mean bringing in trucks and pouring cement. It could very well mean transforming in a way that ekes out more productivity from your existing facilities before you rush into something new. Is that typically the case? How often does that really happen where you can wring out enough efficiency to postpone the actual new facility?

Grindle: It happens time and time again. I am working with a company right now that was looking at going to eight data centers and by implementing a lot of these new technologies -- higher virtualization rates, improvements to their applications, and better management of their data on their storage. We're trying to get them down into two data centers. So right there is a substantial change. And, that’s just an example of things that I have seen time and time again, as we've done these workshops.

A big part of this is working through what the customer really needs and what their business drivers really are. In some cases, we're finding out that brick and mortar aren’t really the right solutions for their data centers. They should look at collocation or even at more creative solutions like the HP Data Center POD, where you can stand up one of these containers filled with high density, very modern equipment, and meet all their needs without doing anything to your existing data center.

It's all about walking through the problems and the issues that are at hand and figuring out what the right answers are to meet their needs, while trying to control the expense.

What's next?

Gardner: Okay, I am starting to get it now. I see why these two workshops play off of one another, because you are laying out all the things that have happened at HP, what to expect, and what some of the alternatives are. That way you've got in your mind a set of alternative directions. Then, by doing the Maturity Model, you get a sense of where you are and where you can go, and putting the two together can start you on that path.

Let’s look at that future path a little bit. Folks have taken these workshops and gotten a better sense of the holistic full total equation. What usually happens next? What's the process from research, understanding, and knowledge to actually starting to hammer out a definition of what you and your particular situation as an organization should do?

Let me fire that first off at you, Helen.

Tang: As often happens, it depends. It’s based on your organization’s business needs. Where are you trying to go in the next year, two years, or five years? It’s also based on the level of constraint that you face right now in the data center.

We see one of two paths. In the more transformational approach, whereby you have the highest level of buy-in, all the way up to the CIO and sometimes CFO and CEO, you lay out an actual 12-18 month plan. HP can help with that, and you start executing towards that. You say, "Okay, what would be the first step?" A lot of times, it makes sense to standardize, consolidate. Then, what is the next step? Sometimes that’s modernizing applications, and so on. That’s one approach we have seen.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation. Then, we take a more project-based approach. It still helps them a lot going through these two workshops. They get to see the big picture and all the things that are possible, but they start picking low-hanging fruit that would yield the highest ROI and solve their current pain points.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation.



Often, in these past few years, it has been virtualization. What is my current virtualization level? How do I take it up to maximum efficiency? And then, look to adjacent projects. So, the next step might be consolidation, or automation, and so on.

Gardner: Mark Edelmann, same to you. Are there some typical scenarios that you've seen that folks when they have digested the implications from these workshops then have a vision or a direction, and what typically would that be?

Edelmann: Helen did a great job of outlining it, because different customers start at different places and they are headed for different places. Often, the journey is a little bit different from one customer to the other.

The Maturity Model Workshop you might think of as being at a little lower level than the Data Center Transformation Workshop. As a result of the Maturity Model Workshops, we produce a report for the customer to understand -- A is where I'm at, and B is where I'm headed. Those gaps that are identified during the course of the assessment help lead a customer to project definitions.

In some cases, there may be some obvious things that can be done in the short term and capture some of that low-hanging fruit -- perhaps just implement a blade system or something like that -- that will give them immediate results on the path to higher maturity in their transformation journey.

Multiple starting points

There are multiple starting points and consequently multiple exit points from the Maturity Model Workshop as well.

Gardner: Mark Grindle, same kind of question. How do people take what they've gathered here to use it? Any stories or anecdotes about what you have seen people do with this that has helped them?

Grindle: Mark and Helen were both right in their comments. The result of the workshop is really a sequence series of events that the customer should follow up on next. Those can be very specific items, like gather your physical server inventories so that that can be analyzed, to other items such as run a Maturity Model Workshop, so that you can understand where you are in each of the areas and what the gaps are, based on where you really want to be.

It’s always interesting when we do these workshops, because we pull together a group of senior executives covering all the domains that I've talked about -- program management, governance -- their infrastructure people, their technology people, their applications people, and their operational people, and it’s always funny, the different results we see.

I had one customer that said to me that the deliverable we gave them out in the workshop was almost anti-climatic versus what they learned in the workshop. What they had learned during this one was that many people had different views of where the organization was and where it wanted to go.

It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head.



Each was correct from their particular discipline, but from an overarching view of what are we trying to do for the business, they weren’t all together on all of that. It’s funny how we see those lights go on as people are talking and you get these interesting dialogs of people saying, "Well, this is how that is." And someone else going, "No, it’s not. It’s really like this."

It’s amazing the collaboration that goes on just among the customer representatives above and beyond the customer with HP. It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head. It ends up motivating people to start taking those next actions and figuring out how they can move their data centers and their IT environment in a much more logical, and in most cases, aggressive fashion than they were originally thinking.

Gardner: It sounds like a very powerful exercise for a lot of different reasons. For those folks interested, how could they learn more about these workshops? Are there some resources out there whereby they go to find them? Let me start with you, Helen.

Tang: The place to go would be hp.com/go/dct.

Gardner: That’s pretty straightforward. Any other thoughts Mark and Mark about where you could go to pursue information if you were starting to get interested in these workshops?

Edelmann: Well, it’s probably not a big surprise, but to learn more about the CI Maturity Model, you can go to hp.com/go/cimm.

Gardner: And Mark Grindle?

Grindle: I agree with both of those. Obviously your HP account rep can help you. We have an HP IT Forum coming up soon. For people who are attending, we do mini workshops during this event. We set up a day that individual customers can come in for an hour and we walk them through each one of the panels very quickly and give them a flavor for what the full workshop would look like. There are a lot of options here for people to get a better understanding of the workshop and how it can help them.

Gardner: So, you can get the appetizer before the entrée?

Grindle: Absolutely.

Gardner: Well, thank you. You have been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the need for DCT and some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

I would like to thank our guests. We have been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Thanks again, Helen,

Tang: Thanks, Dana. Always a pleasure.

Gardner: And Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager, HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Networking Business Unit. Thanks to you, Mark.

Edelmann: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Mark Grindle, Business Consultant, Data Center Infrastructure Services in the Technology Services within HP Enterprise Business. Thanks to you.

Grindle: Thank you, Dana. It was great being here.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Friday, December 18, 2009

Careful Advance Planning Averts Costly Snafus in Data Center Migration Projects

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on proper planning for data-center transformation and migration.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the crucial migration phase when moving or modernizing data centers. So much planning and expensive effort goes into building new data centers or in conducting major improvements to existing ones, but too often there's short shrift in the actual "throwing of the switch" -- in the moving and migrating existing applications and data.

But, as new data center transformations pick up -- due to the financial pressures to boost overall IT efficiency -- so too should the early-and-often planning and thoughtful execution of the migration itself get proper attention. Therefore, our podcast at hand examines the best practices, risk mitigation tools, and requirements for conducting data center migrations properly, in ways that ensure successful overall data center improvement.

To help pave the way to making data center migrations come off nearly without a hitch, we're joined by three thought leaders from Hewlett-Packard (HP). Please join me in welcoming Peter Gilis, data center transformation architect for HP Technology Services. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Peter Gilis: Thank you. Hello, everyone.

Gardner: We're also joined by John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. It's a delight to be here.

Gardner: Arnie McKinnis, worldwide product marketing manager for Data Center Modernization at HP Enterprise Services. Thanks for joining us, Arnie.

Arnie McKinnis: Thank you for including me, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: John, tell me why migration, the process around the actual throwing of the switch -- and the planning that leads up to that -- are so essential nowadays?

New data centers

Bennett: Let's start by taking a look at why this has arisen as an issue. It makes the reasons almost self-evident. We see a great deal of activity in the marketplace right now of people designing and building new data centers. Of course for everyone who has successfully built their new data center, they have this wonderful new showcase site, and they have to move into it.

The reasons for this growth, the reasons for moving to other data centers, are fueled by a lot of different activities. Oftentimes, multiple factors come into play at the same organization.

In many cases it's related to growth. The organization and the business have been growing. The current facilities were inadequate for purpose, because of space or energy capacity reasons or because they were built 30 years ago, and so the organization decides that it has to either build a new data center or perhaps make use of a hosted data center. As a result, they are going to have to move into it.

It might be that they're engaged in a data-center strategy project as part of a data-center transformation, where they might have had too many data centers -- that was the case at Hewlett-Packard -- and consciously decided that they wanted to have fewer data centers built for the purposes of the organization. Once that strategy is put into place and executed, then, of course, they have to move into it.

We see in many cases that customers are looking at new data centers -- either ones they've built or are hosted and managed by others -- because of green strategy and green initiatives. They see that as a more cost-effective way for them to meet their green initiatives than to build their own data centers.

There are, of course, cost reductions. In many cases, people are investing in these types of activities on the premise that they will save substantial CAPEX and OPEX cost over time by having invested in new data centers or in data center moves.

Whether they're moving to a data center they own, moving to a data center owned and managed by someone else, or outsourcing their data center to a vendor like HP, in all cases you have to physically move the assets of the data center from one location to another.

The impact of doing that well is awfully high. If you don't do it well, you're going to impact the services provided by IT to the business. You're very likely, if you don't do it well, to impact your service level agreements (SLAs). And, should you have something really terrible happen, you may very well put your own job at risk.

So, the objective here is not only to take advantage of the new facilities or the new hosted site, but also to do so in a way that ensures the right continuity of business services. That ensures that service levels continue to be met, so that the business, the government, or the organization continues to operate without disruption, while this takes place. You might think of it, as our colleagues in Enterprise Services have put it, as changing the engine in the aircraft while it's flying.

Gardner: Peter, tell me, when is the right time to begin planning for this migration?

Migration is the last phase

Gilis: The planning starts, when you do a data-center transformation, and migration is actually the last phase of that data center transformation. The first thing that you do is a discovery, making sure that you know all about the current environment, not only the servers, the storage, and the network, but the applications and how they interact. Based on that, you decide how the new data center should look.

John, here is something where I do not completely agree with you. Most of the migrations today are not migration of the servers, the assets, but actually migration of the data. You start building a next-generation data center, most of the time with completely new assets that better fit what your company wants to achieve. This is not always possible, when your current environment is something like four or five years old, or sometimes even much older than that.

Gardner: Peter, how do you actually pull this off? How do you get that engine changed on the plane while keeping it flying? Obviously, most companies can't afford to go down for a week while this takes place.

Gilis: You should look at it in different ways. If you have a disaster strategy, then you have multiple days to recover. Actually, if you plan the disaster in a good fashion, then it will be easy to migrate.

On the other side, if you build your new engine, your new data center, and you have all the new equipment inside, the only thing that you need to do is migrate the data. There are a lot of techniques to migrate data online, or at least synchronize current data in the current data centers with the new data center.

Usually, what you find out is that you did not do a good enough job of assessing the current situation, whether that was the assessment of a hardware platform, server platform, or the assessment of a facility.



So, the moment you switch off the computer in the first data center, you can immediately switch it on in the new data center. It may not be changing the engines online, but at least near-online.

Gardner: Arnie, tell me about some past disasters that have given us insights into how this should go properly? Are there any stories that come to mind about how not to do this properly?

McKinnis: There are all sorts of stories around not doing it properly. In most cases, you start doing the decompose of what went wrong during a project. Usually, what you find out is that you did not do a good enough job of assessing the current situation, whether that was the assessment of a hardware platform, server platform, or the assessment of a facility.

It may even be as simple as looking at a changeover process that is currently in place seeing how that affects what is going to be the new changeover process. Potentially, there is some confusion. But it usually all goes back to not doing a proper assessment of the current mode of operations, or the current mode of that operating platform as it exists today.

Gardner: Now, Arnie, this must provide to you a unique opportunity -- as organizations are going to be moving from one data center to another -- to take a hard look at what they have got. I'm going to assume that not everything is going to go to the new data center.

Perhaps you're going to take an opportunity to sunset some apps, replace some with commodity services, or outsource others. So, this isn't just a one-directional migration. We're probably talking about a multi-headed dragon going in multiple directions. Is that the case?

Thinking it through

McKinnis: It's always the case. That's why, from Enterprise Services' standpoint, we look at it from who is going to manage it, if the client hasn't completely thought that out? In other words, potentially they haven't thought out the full future mode of what they want their operating environment to look like.

We're not necessarily talking about starting from a complete greenfield, but people have come to us in the past and said, "We want to outsource our data centers." Our next logical question is, "What do you mean by that?"

So, you start the dialog that goes down that path. And, on that path you may find out that what they really want to do is outsource to you, maybe not only their mission-critical applications, but also the backup and the disaster recovery of those applications.

When they first thought about it, maybe they didn't think through all of that. From an outsourcing perspective, companies don't always do 100 percent outsourcing of that data-center environment or that shared computing environment. It may be part of it. Part of it they keep in-house. Part of it they host with another service provider.

What becomes important is how to manage all the multiple moving parts and the multiple service providers that are going to be involved in that future mode of operation. It's accessing what we currently have, but it's also designing what that future mode needs to look like.

What becomes important is how to manage all the multiple moving parts and the multiple service providers that are going to be involved in that future mode of operation.



Gardner: Back to you, Peter. You mentioned the importance of data, and I imagine that when we go from traditional storage to new modes of storage, storage area networks (SANs) for example, we've got a lot of configuration and connection issues with how storage and data are used in conjunction with applications and processes. How do you manage that sort of connection and transformation of configuration issues?

Gilis: Well, there's not that much difference between local storage, SAN storage, or network attached storage (NAS) and what you designed. The only thing that you design or architect today is that basically every server or every single machine, virtual or physical, gets connected to a shared storage, and that shared storage should be replicated to a disaster recovery site.

That's basically the way you transfer the data from the current data centers to the new data centers, where you make sure that you build in disaster recovery capabilities from the moment you do the architecture of the new data center.

Gardner: Again, this must come back to a function of proper planning to do that well?

Know where you're going

Gilis: That's correct. If you don't do the planning, if you don't know where you're starting from and where you're going to, then it's like being on the ocean. Going in any direction will lead you anywhere, but it's probably not giving you the path to where you want to go. If you don't know where to go to, then don't start the journey.

Gardner: John Bennett, another tricky issue here is that when you transition from one organizational facility to another, or one sourcing set to another larger set, we're also dealing here with ownership trust. I guess that boils down to politics -- who controls what. We're not just managing technology, but we're managing people. How do we get a handle on that to make that move smoothly?

Bennett: Politics, in this case, is just the interaction and the interrelationship between the organizations and the enterprise. They're a fact of life. Of course, they would have already come into play, because getting approval to execute a project of this nature would almost of necessity involve senior executive reviews, if not board of director approval, especially if you're building your own data center.

But, the elements of trust come in, whether you're building a new data center or outsourcing, because people want to know that, after the event takes place, things will be better. "Better" can be defined as: a lot cheaper, better quality of service, and better meeting the needs of the organization.

This has to be addressed in the same way any other substantial effort is addressed -- in the personal relationships of the CIO and his or her senior staff with the other executives in the organization, and with a business case. You need measurement before and afterward in order to demonstrate success. Of course, good, if not flawless, execution of the data center strategy and transformation are in play here.

Be aware of where people view their ownership rights and make sure you are working hand-in-hand with them instead of stepping over them.



The ownership issue may be affected in other ways. In many organizations it's not unusual for individual business units to have ownership of individual assets in the data center. If modernization is at play in the data center strategy, there may be some hand-holding necessary to work with the business units in making that happen. This happens whether you are doing modernization and virtualization in the context of existing data centers or in a migration. By the way, it's not different.

Be aware of where people view their ownership rights and make sure you are working hand-in-hand with them instead of stepping over them. It's not rocket science, but it can be very painful sometimes.

Gardner: Again, it makes sense to be doing that early rather than later in the process.

Bennett: Oh, you have to do a lot of this before you even get approval to execute the project. By the time you get to the migration, if you don't have that in hand, people have to pray for it to go flawlessly.

Gardner: People don't like these sorts of surprises when it comes to their near and dear responsibilities?

Bennett: We can ask both Peter and Arnie to talk to this. Organizational engagement is very much a key part of our planning process in these activities.

Gardner: Arnie, tell us a little bit more about that process. The planning has to be inclusive, as we have discussed. We're talking about physical assets. We're talking about data, applications, organizational issues, people, and process. We haven’t talked about virtualization, but moving from physical to virtualized instances is also there. Give us a bit of a rundown of what HP brings to the table in trying to manage such a complex process.

It's an element of time

McKinnis: First of all, we have to realize that one of the things that happens in this whole process is that it's time. A client, at least when they start working with us from an outsourcing perspective, has come to the conclusion that they believe that a service provider can probably do it more efficiently and effectively and at a better price point than they can internally.

There are all sorts of decisions that go around that from a client perspective to get to that decision. In many cases, if you look at it from a technology standpoint, the point of decision is something around getting to an end of life on a platform or an application. Or, there is a new licensing cycle, either from a support standpoint or an operating system standpoint.

There is usually something that happens from a technology standpoint that says, "Hey look, we've got to make a big decision anyway. Do we want to invest going this way, that we have gone previously, or do we want to try a new direction?"

Once they make that decision, we look at outside providers. It can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to go through the full cycle of working through all the proposals and all the due diligence to build that trust between the service provider and the client. Then, you get to the point, where you can actually make the decision of, "Yes, this is what we are going to do. This is the contract we are going to put in place." At that point, we start all the plans to get it done.

. . . There are times when deals just fall apart, sometimes in the middle, and they never even get to the contracting phase.



As you can see, it's not a trivial deal. We've seen some of these deals get half way through the process, and then the client decides, perhaps through personnel changes on the client side, or the service providers may decide that this isn't going quite the way that they feel it can be most successful. So, there are times when deals just fall apart, sometimes in the middle, and they never even get to the contracting phase.

There are lots of moving parts, and these things are usually very large. That's why, even though outsourcing contracts have changed, they are still large, are still multi-year, and there are still lots of moving parts.

When we look at the data center world, it just is one of those things where all of us take steps to make sure that we're always looking at the best case. We're always looking at what is the real case. We're always building toward what can happen and trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves.

This is little bit different than when you're just doing consulting and pure transformation and building that to the future environment. You can be a little bit more greenfield in your environment and the way you do things.

Gardner: I suppose the tendency is to get caught up in planning all about where you're ending up, your destination, and not focusing as much as you should on that all-important interim journey of getting there?

Keeping it together

McKinnis: From an outsourcing perspective, our organization takes it mostly from that state, probably more so than you could do in that future mode. For us, it's all about making sure that things do not fall apart while we are moving you forward. There are a lot of dual systems that get put in place. There are a lot of things that have to be kept running, while we are actually building that next environment.

Gilis: But, Arnie, that's exactly the same case when you don't do outsourcing. When you work with your client, and that's what it all comes down to, it should be a real partnership. If you don't work together, you will never do a good migration, whether it's outsourcing or non-outsourcing. At the end, the new data center must receive all of the assets or all of the data -- and it must work.

Most of the time, the people that know best how it used to work are the customers. If you don't work with and don't partner directly with the customer, then migration will be very, very difficult. Then, you'll hit the difficult parts that people know will fail, and if they don't inform you, you will have to solve the problem.

Gardner: Peter, as an architect, you must see that these customers you're dealing with are not all equal. There are going to be some in a position to do this better than others. I wonder whether there's something that they've done or put in place. Is it governance, change management, portfolio management, or configuration databases with a common repository of record? Are there certain things that help this naturally?

You have small migration and huge migrations. The best thing is to cut things into small projects that you can handle easily.



Gilis: As you said, there are different customers. You have small migration and huge migrations. The best thing is to cut things into small projects that you can handle easily. As we say, "Cut the elephant in pieces, because otherwise you can't swallow it."

Gardner: But, even the elephant itself might differ. How about you, John Bennett? Do you see some issues where there is some tendency toward some customers to have adopted certain practices, maybe ITIL, maybe service-oriented architecture (SOA), that make migration a bit smoother?

Bennett: There are many ways to approach this. Cutting up the elephant so you can eat it is a more interesting way of advising customers to build out their own roadmap of projects and activities, but, in the end, implement their own transformation.

In an ideal data center project, because it's such a significant effort, it's always very useful to take into consideration other modernization and technology initiatives, before and during, in order to make the migration effective.

For example, if you're going to do modernization of the infrastructure, have the new infrastructure housed in the new data center, and now you are just migrating data and applications instead of physical devices, then you have much better odds of it happening successfully.

Cleaning up internally

If you can do work with your applications or your business processes before you initiate the move, what you are doing is cleaning up the operations internally. Along the way, it's a discovery process, which Peter articulated as the very first step in the migration project. But, you're making the discovery process easier, because there are other activities you have to do.

Gardner: A lot of attention is being given to cloud computing at almost abstract level, but not too far-fetched. Taking advantage of cloud computing means being able to migrate a data center; large chunks of that elephant moving around. Is this something people are going to be doing more often?

Bennett: It's certainly a possibility. Adopting a cloud strategy for specific business services would let you take advantage of that, but in many of these environments today cloud isn't a practical solution yet for the broad diversity of business services they're providing.

We see that for many customers it's the move from dedicated islands of infrastructure, to a shared infrastructure model, a converged infrastructure, or an adaptive infrastructure. Those are significant steps forward with a great deal of value for them, even without getting all the way to cloud, but cloud is definitely on the horizon.

What we're moving toward, if done properly, is a breaking off, especially in the enterprise, of the security and compliance issues around data.



Gardner: Can we safely say, though, that we're seeing more frequent migrations and perhaps larger migrations?

McKinnis: In general, what we've seen is the hockey stick that's getting ready to happen with shared compute. I'll just throw it out there as what this stuff is in the data centers, kind of a shared-compute environment. What we're moving toward, if done properly, is a breaking off, especially in the enterprise, of the security and compliance issues around data.

There is this breaking off of what can be done, what should be done at the desktop or user level, what should be kept locally, and then what should be kept at a shared compute or a shared-services level.

Gardner: Perhaps we're moving toward an inflection point, where we're going to see a dramatic uptake in the need for doing migration activities?

McKinnis: I think we will. Cloud has put things back in people's heads around what can be put out there in that shared environment. I don't know that we've quite gotten through the process of whether it should be at a service provider location, my location, or within a very secure location at an outsourced environment.

Where to hold data

I don't think they've gotten to that at the enterprise level. But, they're not quite so convinced about giving users the ability to retain data and do that processing, have that application right there, held within that confinement of that laptop, or whatever it happens to be that they are interacting with. They're starting to see that it potentially should be held someplace else, so that the risk of that data isn't held at the local level. Do you understand where I am going with that?

Gardner: I do. I think we are seeing greater responsibility now being driven toward the data center, which is going to then force the re-architecting and the capacity issues, which will ultimately then require choices about sourcing, which will then of course require a variety of different migration activities.

McKinnis: Right. It's not just about a new server or a new application. Sometimes it's as much about, "How do I stay within compliance? Am I a public company or am I am a large government entity? How do I stay within my compliance and my regulations? How do I hold data? How do I have to process it?"

Even in the world of global service delivery, there are a lot of rules and regulations around where data can be stored. In that leveraged environment that a service provider provides, potentially storage is in somewhere in Eastern Europe, India, or in South America. There are plenty of compliance issues around where data can actually be held within certain governmental regulations, depending on where you are -- in country or out of country.

Planning is key -- not only planning the migration itself, but also doing "plan B" -- what if it doesn't work -- because then you have to go back to the old rule as soon as possible and within the time frame given.



Gardner: Let's move to Peter. Tell me a bit about some examples. Moving back to the migration itself, can you give us a sense of how this is done well, and if there are some metrics of success, when it is done well?

Gilis: As we already said in the beginning, it all depends on planning. Planning is key -- not only planning the migration itself, but also doing "plan B" -- what if it doesn't work -- because then you have to go back to the old rule as soon as possible and within the time frame given.

First, you need to plan, "Is my application suitable for a migration?" Sometimes, if you migrate your data centers from place A to place B -- as we've done in EMEA, from Czech Republic to Austria -- the distance of 350 kilometers gives an extra latency. If your programs, and we have tested them for the customer, already have performance problems, the little extra latency can just kill your program when you migrate.

One of the things we have done in that case is that we've tested it using a network simulator on a real-life machine. We found that the application was not adaptive, or the server was not adaptive for migration. If you know this beforehand, then you remove a risk by just migrating it on its own.

In another customer I saw that people had divided the whole migration process into multiple streams, but there was a lack of coordination between the streams. This means that if you have a shared application related to more than one stream, the planning of the one stream was totally in conflict with the planning of another stream. This means that the application and the data moved without informing the other streams, causing huge delays in real life, because the other applications were not synchronized anymore in the same way they used to be, assuming they were synchronized before.

So, if you don't plan and work together, you will definitely have failures.

Gardner: You mentioned something that was interesting about trying to do this on a test basis. I suppose that for that application development process, you'd want to have a test and dev and use some sort of a testbed, something that's up before you go into full production. Perhaps we also want to put some of these servers, data sets, and applications through some sort of a test to see if they are migration ready. Is that an important and essential part of this overall process?

Directly to the site

Gilis: If you can do it, it's excellent, but sometimes we still see in real life that not all customers have a complete test and dev environment, or not even an acceptance environment. Then, the only way to do it is to move the real-life machine directly to the new site.

I've actually seen it. It wasn't really a migration, but an upgrade of an SAP machine. Because of performance problems, the customer needed to migrate to a new, larger server. And, because of the pressure of the business, they didn't have time to move from test and dev, to acceptance, and to production. They started immediately with production.

At two o'clock in the morning we found that there was a bug in the new version and we had to roll back the whole migration and the whole upgrade. That's not the best time in the middle of the weekend.

Gardner: John Bennett, we've heard again and again today about how important it is to do this planning, to get it done upfront, and to get that cooperation as early as possible. So the big question for me now is how do you get started?

Bennett: How you get started depends on what your own capabilities and expertise are. If these are projects that you've undertaken before, there's no reason not to implement them in a similar manner. If they are not, it starts with the identification of the business services and the sequencing of how you want them to be moved into the new data center and provisioned over there.

We have successfully undertaken customer data center migration projects, which had minimal or zero operational disruption, by making clever use of short-term leases to ensure that business services continue to run, while they are transitioned to a new data center.



In order to plan that level of detail, you need to have, as Peter highlighted earlier, a really good understanding of everything you have. You need to fully build out a model of the assets you have, what they are doing, and what they are connected to, in order to figure out the right way to move them. You can do this manually, or you can make use of software like HP's Discovery and Dependency Mapping software.

If the size of this project is a little daunting to you, then of course the next step is to take advantage of someone like HP. We have Discovery Services, and, of course, we have a full suite of migration services available, with people trained and experienced in doing this to help customers move and migrate data centers, whether it's to their own or to an outsourced data center.

Peter talked about planning this with a disaster in mind to understand what downtime you can plan for. We have successfully undertaken customer data center migration projects, which had minimal or zero operational disruption, by making clever use of short-term leases to ensure that business services continue to run, while they are transitioned to a new data center. So, you can realize that too.

But, I'd also ask both Peter and Arnie here, who are much more experienced in this, to highlight the next level of detail. Just what goes into that effective planning, and how do you get started?

Gardner: I'd also like to hear that, Peter. In the future, I expect that, as always, new technologies will be developed to help on these complex issues. Looking forward, are there some hopeful signs that there is going to be a more automated way to undertake this?

Migration factory

Gilis: If you do a lot of migrations, and that's actually what most of the service companies like HP are doing, we know how to do migrations and how to treat some of the applications migrated as part of a "migration factory."

We actually built something like a migration factory, where teams are doing the same over and over all the time. So, if we have to move Oracle, we know exactly how to do this. If we have to move SAP, we know exactly how to do this.

That's like building a car in a factory. It's the same thing day in and day out, everyday. That's why customers are coming to service providers. Whether you go to an outsourcing or non-outsourcing, you should use a service provider that builds new data centers, transforms data centers, and does migration of data centers nearly every day.

Gardner: I'm afraid we're just about out of time and we're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank our guests for an insightful set of discussion points around data center migration.

As we said earlier, major setups and changes with data-center facilities often involve a lot of planning and expense, but sometimes not quite enough planning goes into the migration itself. Here to help us better understand and look towards better solutions around data center migration, we have been joined by Peter Gilis, data center transformation architect for HP Technology Services. Thanks so much, Peter.

Gilis: Thank you.

Gardner: Also John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks, John.

Bennett: You're most welcome, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Arnie McKinnis, worldwide product marketing manager for Data Center Modernization in HP Enterprise Services. Thanks for your input, Arnie.

McKinnis: Thank you, Dana. I've enjoyed being included here.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on proper planning for data-center transformation and migration. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.