This is part 4 of a 4-part series on how to set up your data center migration for success. Here we go over the final stage: optimization.
If you’re looking for the other steps in this journey, check out our other blog posts in the series:
Part 1: Data Discovery
Part 2: Planning
Part 3: Execution
Congratulations! You’ve survived your data center migration project. You’ve managed the discovery, planning and execution stages and everything is up and running. But if you think your work is done, think again.
Data has become the most valuable asset of an enterprise and protecting that data, as well as enterprise end user and customer access, is a primary concern of any IT infrastructure manager. It’s estimated that data center downtime can cost US$9,000 per minute, so even once you have executed your data center migration, you need to focus on monitoring your assets and environment to optimize performance and safeguard against issues.
Any data center outage can cause issues, impact employee or customer access, halt important business functions and lead to a loss of revenue. Outages happen for many reasons, including:
In fact, while human error is cited as only one of the reasons, it’s a big contributor to many of the others, and it has been found that, 70% of failures can be attributed to human error. Whether that’s mishandling equipment such as batteries or hardware, missing out steps in the maintenance process, not correctly protecting equipment or even failing to connect back-up power, if you are monitoring and optimizing your on-prem data center you need to make sure everyone follows processes to the letter.
If you have moved to a public cloud service provider, you will have little or no control over resources. You should, however, continue to monitor activities to ensure performance is maintained in line with your service level agreement(s).
To mitigate risks and optimize your resources, you should monitor your data center facilities and assets across your entire environment as an ongoing program, focusing on:
By continually monitoring your data center environments and incorporating that information into your wider, IT asset management program (ITAM) you can also benefit from:
You need to be able to quickly react to changes and issues to limit their impact and report your findings, actions, and recommendations to key project stakeholders. That means regularly pulling together information across your physical and virtual environments and spending time communicating with teams at your data center locations as well as your cloud service provider.
Given that human error is one of the biggest contributors to data center failure, by limiting the number of manual processes you rely on, such as data collection and analysis,, you could dramatically reduce issues.
ReadyWorks automates 50% or more of manual tasks across a data center migration project and beyond, including data collation, analysis, planning, execution, and reporting. By connecting to and orchestrating your tools, databases, and systems, ReadyWorks simplifies the monitoring and optimization process by:
Schedule a demo to see how ReadyWorks can help you optimize your data center performance as an ongoing process.