Expansion Planning For Systems Growth (continued)
"It's a very expensive proposition, even in a best case scenario," says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., an IT consultancy based in Milford, Mass. "All of a company's applications can be dynamically migrated online to a new site, but IT must make sure everything is synched and online before doing a hard cut over and decommissioning the old site."
But Duplessie cautions that such moves never go perfectly smoothly and it takes an enormous amount of time -- at least a year -- and bandwidth on top of the cost to complete a move and upgrade.
Starting Over
On the plus side, moving a data center enables a company to start with a clean slate. It can be an opportunity to recognize the past infrastructure mistakes and to architect and configure for the new millennium going forward.
Duplessie suggests that if an old data center site isn't going to go away, it can then be used as a disaster recovery backup site. He believes companies are starting to recognize that assets that have depreciated are ideal for housing second tier applications, or for disaster recovery.
"Many companies prefer to get rid of their old assets and tend to buy infrastructure for infrastructure sake," says Duplessie, "which solves one problem and creates another -- that's the nature of computing."
Another way to conserve data center space and plan for future growth, says Duplessie, is to evaluate data and determine what is mission critical and what isn't. "People are starting to realize that not all data should be treated exactly the same and not all data needs to be on the highest tech, most expensive gizmos." (article continues)
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