Relocate with Confidence…
In today's business environment, every organization wants to produce a higher quality product and deliver that product as quickly as possible, while maximizing profit. For an ever increasing number of companies, there is a need to do this internationally as well. The IT infrastructure necessary to support these demanding requirements must move at an even faster pace just to keep up. But today's Data Center managers are struggling to do that. Interfering with their efforts are new and ever-changing applications, the growth of new technology, the large increase in energy costs and the demand to lower overall expenses.
Corus is working with many customers today who want to tackle this challenge head on by consolidating data centers, moving infrastructure to virtual environments, replacing outdated hardware and defining metrics that allow management to make the critical decisions as fast as possible.
Our services focus on the following key areas:
Data Center Relocation and Design
If you are considering relocating your data center and need an experienced team to assist in the move, Corus is that team. The first step begins with a meeting to discuss and understand the requirements of the relocation. Some projects may require us to lead the entire effort, while others may require us to merely supplement the project team that may be missing a specific skill set required to facilitate the data center move. Whatever your need, Corus can help.
As the initial project starts, our project managers create and update two key deliverables:
- Relocation Project Plan
- dataMIGRATE©
Relocation Project Plan
The Project Plan is the document that manages and drives the entire project from start to finish. It is reviewed and updated regularly so that the project remains on track. The project plan is structured by section and customized by each individual project. Every data center move is unique; therefore, the project plan is tailored to meet your specific needs. Our relocation process is comprised of five phases: Discovery, Design, Planning, Execution and Project Close.
The Discovery phase is used to fully document all the critical items needed to move to the next phase in order to start designing the target site. The discovery process employs both tools and manual methods to collect the necessary data. A sampling of data collected would be: equipment profiles, applications, backup processes, network design specifications, disaster recovery information, circuit information, project team names, 3rd party support vendors, AC power and more…
The Design phase uses the data collected in the discovery phase to start designing the target site. During this phase, meetings are scheduled with all key project members for each design area: floor layout, facility power-cooling-UPS-and generator, rack design, cabling requirements and more…
The Planning phase is the time necessary to plan and manage the project to completion. The planning work would include these high level tasks: building the overall project plan, conducting weekly status meetings, writing the weekly status reports, conducting meetings as needed with each platform group, assisting in defining the move windows, documenting and tracking project cost, assistance in building the “move day” plan and more…
The Execution phase is “Move Weekend”. After the Discovery, Design and Planning phases are complete, it is time to start moving the equipment. In the last year, we have seen this phase evolve from being mostly “fork-lift” type moves (for example, pick up what you have and ship it to the new site) to a phase where systems can be moved in a variety of ways. Some examples include moving to a Virtualized environment, migrating to new hardware, consolidating to Blade technology or moving over a longer time period, such as 3-6 months.
The Project Close phase is used to turn over all the master documents and conduct a “lessons learned” meeting where both the successes and issues of the project are discussed.
dataMIGRATE
Another major benefit of using Corus on your next project is how we leverage best practices during the project. This is where the second key deliverable, dataMIGRATE, comes in. Within days of the project start, dataMIGRATE is enabled for the complete project team. dataMIGRATE is a web-based application that helps manage and track the complete inventory of equipment, applications, contacts and other key project items. By importing the data into the system, reports can be quickly generated to identify gaps and start bringing all the data into a central location.
If you are looking to supplement your staff on a relocation project, consider the following services we offer independently.
- Project Management
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- Equipment Transportation
- Storage Design
- Tape Backup Audits
- Data Center Cable Design
- Swing G
- Network Design
- De-Install and Re-Install Services
- Server Consolidation
- Facilities Design
- Automated Discovery Services
Contact Corus
Contact Corus today. Let us show you how to reduce your costs and raise efficiency to levels your business has never experienced.