Support in analytics and planning for a data center migration of a large retail company
Customer: an American outdoor retail co-op
Industry: retail
Size: 10,001+ employees
Task: data center migration project
Duration of the project: 8 weeks
Why ConfigureTek?
ConfigureTek is focused on helping customers achieve full benefit from the proper implementation of their CMDB, Discovery, Mapping, Service Management and Asset Management solutions. Our methodologies/best practices are developed so that our customers achieve maximum business value in the shortest time frames across these critical IT functions. We have worked with hundreds of companies over the past 5 years and our abilities to work with solutions from multiple software vendors (ServiceNow, HPE, VMware, etc.) makes us unique in our ability to deliver on customer expectations.
Project Overview
Recently, the ConfigureTek team worked with the IT Infrastructure Management team of a large retail company to support an analytics/planning project for a data center migration. The project included the following tasks: leverage a CMDB and discovery tool to (1) automatically discover and map out server dependencies, (2) create move groups based on discovery results and (3) generate various reports reflecting dependencies, server inventory, and critical configurations. ConfigureTek’s specialists successfully finished the project in 8 weeks.
The client needed fast and complete discovery of server hardware, applications, and server-to-server dependencies to optimize consolidation of servers and move servers to a new remote data center.
To ensure the project was successful ConfigureTek assisted the client with identifying required credentials, address network access requirements and implemented a commercial CMDB and Discovery tool to create and maintain an up-to-date inventory of Unix/Linux and Windows servers, business applications on servers (including Oracle & MS SQL database servers) and much more.
Within the first month of the project, we (customer and ConfigureTek) discovered more than 1100 servers, the dependencies between every server, and began creating move groups that would prevent downtime or any disruption of business service and day-to-day operations.
The customer also stated the need to discover servers, applications, and even communication between servers without installing agents on each system. The agentless discovery was necessitated due to their constant and rapid changing environment and the need to migrate to a new data center. The critical demand for authoritative (discovered) and timely (continuous updates) were the key value drivers behind this project
ConfigureTek’s Approach
ConfigureTek first proved out the ability of the software solution and implementation approach by performing a proof-ff-concept in the customer environment (actually showing ability to achieve all goals of the project on a subset of the environment). With the success of the initial proof of concept, the client quickly rolled out a full implementation of the chosen CMDB and Discovery tool for the data center move. This implementation included:
- Configured software components
- Initiate limited scope discovery to assess expected results
- Install second probe in remote data center
- Scale out discovery per client requirements
- Leverage discovered data and dependencies to create initial move groups for Data Center migration
- Create various reports based on discovered data for Data Center migration analysis
Business Results:
- Discovered 99% of data center servers involved in data center move with dependency information
- Reduced amount of time required to create move groups based on discovered dependencies
- Generate complete inventory list of all data center servers to serve as baseline for customer’s existing CMDB
Contact the ConfigureTek team to better understand how we can leverage our experience and knowledge around the data center migrations to support your IT strategies.
