MSU Completes Data Center Migration 6 Months Early | ReadyWorks

Challenge: Michigan State University, one of the largest in the US, wanted to consolidate and migrate its existing data center architecture into a newly built facility. Ad-hoc growth had resulted in an unstructured collection of devices, and the number of applications critical to the running of the university were unknown. With activities underway, a flood hit the area, and as the waters began rising, the team needed to fast-track the project.

“When the floodwaters started to rise around our data center, we had to immediately accelerate our migration plans while ensuring minimal disruption of critical applications. We needed an accurate, up-to-date view of our current data centers and a way to automate tasks that would have taken months to complete manually.”

Solution: ReadyWorks automated data discovery, and with a clear view of the environment the team was able to build controlled plans. When the flood began, a larger team was mobilized and used those plans to complete the migration in two weeks. Using ReadyWorks, MSU:

• Gained access to the most accurate inventory and visual map of the environment the university had ever seen.
• Could make better decisions about the migration and ongoing operations.
• Migrated two data centers six months ahead of schedule with zero downtime.

ReadyWorks enabled this through:

• System Integration: ReadyWorks connected to MSU’s multiple discovery tools and inventory sources to access their data and capabilities.
• Data Intelligence: ReadyWorks provided a single super dashboard view of the environment – hardware, databases, applications and users, and all dependency mapping – including data owners, elements that were end of life for decommissioning, and potential risks for migration. This enabled the team to build controlled plans in ReadyWorks that guided the breakdown of the migration into waves, by application workload, physical vs virtual resources, vendors, and other criteria.
• Orchestration and Automation: ReadyWorks orchestrated tools and automated migration workflows using system and event triggers. Once the flood waters began rising, the plans, runbooks and communications already implemented in ReadyWorks proved essential, allowing a larger team to quickly determine the remaining elements and prioritize essential kit.

“ReadyWorks allowed us to immediately jumpstart our migration. Incredibly, we were able to get our mission-critical data and applications up and running in under two weeks—with no downtime.”