Accelerating Consolidation of the Modern Data Center

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In an area of change, some things have not changed for a while.  IT organizations are continuing to search for ways to reduce costs, foster innovation, increase agility, and operate more efficiently. There is constant pressure from the business for IT to find a way to meet these objectives, and in the midst of the hybrid cloud era, a lot of organizations are finding that their aging architectures may be hindering their ability to do so.

So where do many IT organizations turn first to achieve transformation and meet the demands of the business?

Well, the answer is their data centers.

Data centers serve as critical starting points for holistic transformation or modernization initiatives. Whether it is adopting cloud, converged, or virtual architectures or refreshing existing infrastructure, many organizations are now taking a look to their data center strategies to achieve this modernization.

Traditionally, data center consolidation or migration events were taken as a means through which to meet facilities related objectives, such as an expiring lease, the need to lower power and cooling costs, capacity issues, or the result of a merger/acquisition. While these use cases are still present, we now see more companies taking on these events as an opportunity to transform to a more efficient and agile infrastructure.

But these projects are not simple undertakings. It’s not all about just backing up the truck and unloading some new data center equipment. These initiatives are very complex and risky to plan and execute, with success hinging heavily upon a solid strategy and plan based on knowledge of the existing environment. These projects require a full understanding of all interdependencies in the environment, between assets, applications, storage, and servers. Lastly the correlation of all these components to the business needs and schedules has to be fully understood.  All of this information needs to be gathered and analyzed in order to determine optimal transition plans, facility configurations, migration methods, schedules, move groups, and so on.

So how do you determine interdependencies between the integrated assets in your environment? This is where automated tools come into play. EMC has been executing data center consolidation, migration, and modernization engagements for close to two decades. Historically, we utilized manual processes and spreadsheets to do much of the discovery work. Now, we utilize an automation tool that has enabled us to shorten the discovery phase by 50% or better in most cases. It also enables us to eliminate close to 98% of human error and virtually eradicate sequence errors.

The use of automated tools in conjunction with EMC’s already robust and patented migration methodology put us ahead of the data center game. We are able to provide real-time updating and management of the environment through automation, which increases staff efficiency and collaboration. We are able to execute migrations with the lowest risk and greatest efficiency possible.

About the Author: Ted Streck

An Experienced Manager with over 30 years industry experience delivering consulting services and IT solutions. Prior to joining Dell Technologies, Ted was a Vice President at a national ISP in charge of their IT Systems and operations. Prior to that Ted was the Vice President of a software development organization, where he was responsible for a 30 million dollar subsidiary. Additionally Ted was part of an acquisition team that acquired over a dozen smaller companies in the course of 25 months. At Dell EMC, Ted has successfully delivered projects that include Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery strategy development, business requirements analysis and systems and application requirements analysis. Ted is experienced in operational management as well as project management and IT infrastructure strategy, implementation and support. Ted has considerable experience in Data Center Strategy, Server and Storage Consolidation and the migration of legacy technology, processes and organizations to new models. Ted is one of the original authors of the Dell EMC data center migration methodology.
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