Case Studies

DATA CENTER MIGRATION

Project Overview
In 2004, a global research-driven Pharmaceutical company engaged in a large corporate initiative to close down two existing datacenters and open a new, centralized datacenter 500 miles from their present location. In addition to the move, they implemented full Disaster Recovery for their most critical applications and upgraded the hardware/software on most of their equipment.

Client Senior Management was confident the company would succeed in this endeavor. To ensure this success, they sought experts in the field of data center migration to lead the infrastructure division, establish proven procedures and provide a solid level of confidence to their staff that the tasks were obtainable. Their search led them to DSA Life Science Consulting (LSC), whose employees successfully completed similar migrations for several other global companies; all of which completed on-time, within budget and had left a lasting affect on their staff. Through diligent planning, this effort allowed them to achieve their goals.

With the combination of DSA LSC’s experience and expertise in Data Center Migration and the client’s resolve to dedicate staff and resources to the project, Client Senior Management moved forward in 2005 and completed the project one month early and under budget. Because of this effort, the client met their goals and leaped ahead of their competition which enable their internal businesses to realize significant cost avoidances and savings while sustaining above-average day-to-day achievements.

Solution Description
DSA LSC provided the client with a proven methodology of authoring a written project plan that clearly described the goals, roles and responsibilities, and listed the assumptions, risks and constraints of the data center migration project. DSA LSC then customized the change control procedures for the client’s environment and implemented the plan over a ten (10) month period. When warranted, DSA LSC advised management of areas that required improvement, along with a recommended plan of action which could be quickly implemented.

Several teams, led by DSA LSC, were assembled to assure project success:

• The Migration Team, comprised of members of the infrastructure and application areas was identified and assembled to plan and execute the project.

• The Migration PMO, comprised of members from all areas that were impacted by the migration project (Networking, Storage, Facilities, etc.) was responsible for maintaining overall issues, risk and dependency management.

Return on Investment
Upon completion, the migration project met the budgeted expenditure and the expected time frame. A total of 1,267 servers, 957 production applications and 4,832 application components (production, development and test) were migrated during this process. (Application components are defined as the individual modules that comprise an entire application such as front-end interface modules, databases, tables or required files and programs.)

Due to diligent planning and experienced management, DSA LSC completed the effort and provided the client with the following significant competitive advantages:

• A State-Of-The-Art Disaster Recovery Datacenter

• A utility environment for Disaster Recovery

• A cost avoidance of several million dollars in annual support contracts, infrastructure and personnel

• Assurance that all necessary infrastructure is in place, configured, tested and capable of supporting a significant number of servers and applications on a consistent basis, including reliable hardware and software backup and restoration along with managed storage

• Educated support teams in the procedures necessary & sufficient to support the model on a day-to-day basis

• An established Regional Data Center infrastructure that is configured and capable of supporting a significant number of users, including sufficient data backup

• An established Disaster Recovery solution that is configured, tested and capable of supporting DR plans in the event of a major disaster

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