Case Study: Data Center Migration

Problem:

A large healthcare client has two data centers in different parts of the country. One of the data centers is older which drove a strategic decision to move all production systems to the newer data center making it the primary. Legient was asked to make recommendations on systems to be included in scope and analyze the level of effort to move non-redundant production systems to the primary data center. This would support a more stable environment and better disaster recovery.

Our Approach:

The initial approach was simple, pull data from the client’s ServiceNow to inventory all the production systems. We quickly discovered that due to data quality issues many details of production systems had not been updated or were in the process of getting upgraded due to deprecated operating systems or hardware. As such the approach required a much more in-depth approach.

1. Meeting with the application owners

2. Determine dependencies, criticality, and upgrade timing

3. Identify logical groupings to move servers

4. Propose budget and overall approach

Execution:

We led a team of infrastructure leaders, application owners and business stakeholders through analysis of the different applications. We focused on understanding the state of the application, whether it was on a deprecated operating system or hardware, the downtime allowances and any application dependencies that existed. After the analysis we determined our scope and lumped like applications into move groups that would minimize downtime and risk. We then worked to identify a technical partner and determine a budget for migration.

Outcome:

The result of our efforts was a migration roadmap and business case to support the recommendation to consolidate their data centers. Additional value was created by providing an updated inventory of the applications and the current state of hardware and operating systems to enable them to strategically plan their infrastructure moving forward.

#casestudy