Data Center Consolidation: Reducing the Risks

[dennis_wenk]

The benefits of data center consolidation are apparent; they save millions of dollars and improve the overall quality of service.  It is easy to see that too many data centers adds unnecessary costs, it chips away at manageability, increases complexity and contributes to a number of operating inefficiencies.  Realizing the economic benefits of data center consolidation can be elusive, the challenge is to circumvent the potential pitfalls that complicated the transformation process.

Data center consolidations involve much more than just moving servers or data from one location into another.  Data centers have become a conglomeration of disparate technologies running on combination of virtual platforms, physical platforms, and clustered platforms that operate an assortment of systems and access a range of data-tiers that are stored on multiple arrays from a whole host of hardware vendors.  

In addition to the medley of technology, the management practices and process-maturity can vary widely from one data center to another.  Layer in the “Green” environmental issues such: as floor space, power consumption and cooling that also need to be addressed and it is easy to see that data center consolidation is one of the most thorny projects any organization.

Identifying the proper data assets to split and migrate is essential to a successful consolidation.  The general lack of information around data ownership, data usage, and theirs critical interactions is a formidable challenge.  These basics are requirements to ensure that sensitive information is protected and to avoid migrating obsolete data unnecessarily.

Symantec’s Data Insight identifies who owns the data, if it is used, how it is being used and who uses it.  After the proper data assets have been identified, migrating the data is a time intensive process.  Loss of access to critical data during a migration must be kept to a minimum.  Traditional backup/restore technologies even with compression and de-duplication capabilities do not address the time-constraints related to large data migrations.  Data replication is a requirement to reduce the loss of access to critical data and maintain time consistency.  Symantec’s Veritas Volume Replicator moves data from any storage array to any storage array and mitigate the loss of access to critical data.   

In the disparate, heterogeneous-world of data center consolidation Symantec’s Storage Foundation HA provides the inter-operable, end-to-end connectivity from any operating system to any storage array provides a huge advantage to simplify the migration effort. Symantec’s Cluster File System provides simultaneous access to data so that mission-critical applications will not lose access to critical data-sets. 

To reduce the probability and costly consequences of a fall-back contingency, Symantec’s Disaster Recovery Advisor identifies interdependencies and configuration drift to ensure that a target data center’s infrastructure has the proper configuration to accept the transition workload.

Data center consolidations are complex but Symantec helps organizations simplify the effort and manage the extensive number of variables related to a data center consolidation by providing compatibility in the disparate data center world.