Continuing our review of your Data Center Move Pre-Planning Phase, breaking down the elements of your Move Playbook, starting with your Master Inventory and your Application inventory, from “What Everybody Ought To Know Before MOVING A DATA CENTER” excerpts used with permission from Blaine Berger, blaine@e-oasis.com.

In a perfect world, you would approach each task in your Move Playbook sequentially, and you would only do each task once with perfection. From experience, ain’t gonna happen!! Never has, never will. Too many organizational issues, your internal culture, and what we call the “organizational coefficient of drag” which is the amount of energy required to gain momentum on a new project within your firm. A topic for another day.

For now, overlooking this organizational coefficient of drag, consider what tasks can be done in parallel. Perhaps these four:
1) Gather the Master Inventory
2) Gather the Application Inventory
3) Build the Master Timeline
4) Build the Stakeholder Communications Matrix.

Your Master Inventory should start with the automated tools you already have available and supplement the inventory with additional data to use in the later stages of your move. The extra data may include:
1) Replacement Value
2) What equipment is still Supported
3) Operating System (OS) versions
4) Power Supplies and their specific connectors
5) IP Addresses
6) Technical Owners
7) Business Owners
8) Move Type-physical, logical, retirement, No Move
9) Membership-Production, Development or Test
10) Backup Validation

You might also include these 3 additional columns to help manage your move sequencing:
1) Origin Rack Location
2) Destination Rack Location
3) Move Sequence

Electronic Transport Corp. has 20+ years of experience in assisting organizations in gathering the inventory of what is moving and where it is moving. If you are planning a Data Center Move, call us today for a No Obligation Consultation. We can help.