Top tips for IT migrations and consolidations

IT migrations come with massive business risks

For IT departments, computing systems obtained from merger partners or acquired companies can induce massive business risk when they need migrating to the new IT infrastructure or consolidating on to existing platforms.

Computing asked Peter Mehta, chief executive of datacentre consolidation firm SANpulse, what his top tips are for a CIO when dealing with a company merger.

Mehta offered the following:

The first thing to do is to bring in a firm to use automation to discover your environment.

That doesn't just mean finding discrete IT components, but the entire infrastructure – that means servers, the switch layer, and the storage layer. Then you need to audit which applications are tied in to those servers.

Check the information discovered, and make sure you know what you want to accomplish with it. If the acquisition or merger proceeds, ask what am I getting – single business units, or the entire IT estate?

Understanding your own IT infrastructure will enable you to figure out the best way of assimilating what IT you’re inheriting. For example, am I migrating 10 petabytes (PB) [of data], 2 petabytes, or just 1 terabyte, and where are we moving it to?

How many servers am I migrating? What's the floor space and power requirement?

Would it be better to do a straight ‘lift and shift’, or do I go back to the drawing board and get my vendors in here, and actually refresh the assets? That way I won’t have to worry for the next four years, because I’ll have a consistent set of ICT assets.

The main reason for an acquisition is usually cost savings. If you're going to have IT cost savings, there had better be some IT overlap that you can leverage.

If I have a [server] frame that currently is only 20 per cent utilised, can I take those acquired assets and use the frame that I already have? Similarly, with virtualisation software, you need to look at whether you're a VMware shop or a Windows shop. You've got your [virtualisation] farms already built, so there should be synergies there.

Overlap doesn’t just mean with physical IT systems, but operationally, because you don't need that many people to manage the new assets.

Check your storage utilisation rates. Typical storage utilisation rates today are 20–25 per cent of the actual physical storage, and I've rarely seen it over 30 per cent.

I have a customer who has 12PB of storage. When they did an actual utilisation analysis, only 3PB was being used. But guess what? They're buying new storage plus frames, based on a growth rate tied to 12PB.

If I base my data growth on a 20 per cent per year rate, I’d be adding 2.4PB per year, when I should be adding it based on 3PB – that’s 600TB – four times less.

Remember your storage vendor won't be pushing you towards the less expensive route. Their interest is in selling you the maximum amount of storage.

Most storage vendors don't do heterogeneous storage discovery for their own benefit. They don't want to focus on optimising any competing storage assets, they want to sell you more disks.