Data center moves are often triggered when your facility has run out of space, power, or cooling. With the proliferation of virtualization, you may view the data center move as a catalyst for moving forward the virtualization agenda. In fact, many information technology projects often appear out of nowhere to hitch their ride to the data center move.

The common mistake made in a data center move is the failure to consider the impact that virtualization will have on the success of the data center move. This is particularly true when the same resources are used for both projects.

To include virtualization before your data center move, you’ll need to adopt a different approach to the typcial go-slow methodology that can take 18 to 24 months to realize any benefits.

Freezing changes in the data center several months before the actual move is a difficult principle to enforce. Many organizations say they’ll implement a freeze, but few have the discipline to impose a successful no-change period. Introducing new technology right before a data center move is a recipie for uncertainty. Your staff is typically not adequately trained, your project is rushed into production without adequate “soak” time, and the project itself can prove to be a distraction from important data center move tasks.

Our data center move plan assessments often reveal that too much risk is involved when virtualization is rushed into production prior to a data center move. In fact, more organizations are attempting to run virtualization for the very first time during the actual data center move.  This illustrates another common data center move mistake — constructing a plan where everything has to go right.

While much has been written about data center site selection and data center commissioning, post move tasks are often overlooked entirely. Decommissioning is one of those often overlooked efforts.

How do you properly decommission a previously active data center?

First, you need to decide what decommisioning actually means to you. Are you stripping the space to the bare four walls? The decommisioning steps will vary widely depending on your end game. If you have even one piece of active equipment in your data center, you are not yet ready for decommissioning.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when your data center needs to be decommissioned:

1. What outside imperatives such as lease terminations drive the timeline for decomissioning?
2. What end state are you leaving the data center?
3. What outside experts do you need so you properly budget for their time? For example, if you are going to sell the CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioners) units, then you’ll need some skills to properly drain and cap the entire chilled water system. You’ll need skills to disable the sprinkler or fire suppression systems.
4. What project manager are you going to put in charge of the decommissioning remembering that you’ve likely already over allocated your entire staff for the new location?
5. Who is paying attention to the proper termination of telecommunications circuits remembering that it’s not uncommon for a telco to disconnect the wrong circuit (such as your new circuits versus your old circuits) so extra vigilance is required.
6. Who has reviewed the relevant contractual details for building leases, equipment contracts, and facility services? It’ s not uncommon to discover that you are contracutally obligated to pay for items for 6 to 12 months  because you failed to give proper written notice.

It’s not uncommon to be planning a data center move into a facility that is being designed or is already under construction. Schedule pressures often compress necessary commissioning activities and shortcuts often lead to surprises later.

The Emergency Power Off (EPO) system should be tested before you move a single piece of equipment into your new data center. Push the big red EPO button and allow plenty of time in your commissioning schedule for the orderly testing and calibration of all of your electrical, cooling, fire suppression, and life safety systems in your data center.

It’s well established that large data centers are seeking cheap power. That criteria can lead to locations where substation improvements are required to provide the redundant power paths that are a key criteria of a modern data center. From a very basic perspective, power should enter the site from different substations following route diversity. Each substation should be sized to handle the entire projected load.

Practically, however, the utility company or the customer may need to engage the services of Power Engineers who specialize in distribution systems and substation design to optimize for the location and to satisfy specific utility requirements.

The intersection of cheap power, available fiber capacity, and low real estate costs has been the recipe for data center site selection. John Rath makes an important observation that “Businesses large and small want their infrastructure in close proximity to their business offices” (read more from John’s data center site selection paper).

This means that data centers will continue to be opened in areas that require upgraded electrical infrastructure. This could range from simple increases in electrical service to full blown re-engineering of the utility feeds that service the desired site.

Modern data centers require the appropriate electrical infrastrucutre of capacity and route diversity to serve their desired purpose.

Wyoming earmarked $1 billion in 2004 to improve power transmission capacity with four projects already underway as a result. Texas also understands the critical need to invest in the transmission grid and is proceeding with plans to put almost $5 billion to work to capitalize on power transmission originating from wind farms.

It’s not as sexy as building a mega-datacenter, but both States stand to benefit nicely in the long term by improving their power grids. It could also touch off a decades-long arms race to improve the capacity of power grids in key areas as these projects require planning and lead-time to complete.

Data center site selection criteria that seek to be located closer to the power generation source could be impacted as these projects approach completion.

Track the investment in the power grid infrastructure and you’ve got a five year window into the potential location of many power-hungry facilities — data centers included.

Wyoming and Texas enjoy high untapped wind energy potential and both realize the importance of getting that engergy on the power grid by investing in that infrastructure.

Moving a data center should be a systematic task with plenty of planning and execution time to produce a solid relocation plan. More often, it’s a scramble to meet an objective set by executive management as part of a larger effort. Some common executive management misconceptions include:

1. Moving a data center is easy.
2. The Information Technology Staff can both move the data center and do their real jobs.
3. There will be zero down time during the move and there will be no new expenditures or duplicate equipment purchased.
4. Moving over the weekend is the best time to move.
5. It should be simple to construct the data center move budget from a Google search.

With that as a partial backdrop, you are searching for data center move plans, data center relocation budgets, and data center movers. You think about writing a data center relocation RFP (Request for Proposal) and find yourself overwhelmed with perfecting a statement of work (SOW). Meanwhile, your executive management wants to know how much this is going to cost and the scramble to build a budget begins as your search for average per square foot costs to move a data center.

You reason that Google has rescued you before and you search harder to locate elements of your relocation plan. But when you come up short, then what?

• Where do you find the elusive data center move checklist?
• How do you calculate moving expenses for data center relocations?
• How do you write a data center relocation statement of work (SOW)?
• What do you need to know about data center site selection?
• What are the common factors that undermine almost every data center move?

Our free data center moving guide can help you understand the complexity of a data center relocation. Educating your executive management is a critical and necessary element for a successful data center move. While Google can help you search for the puzzle pieces of a data center relocation, we can help you save money and avoid costly mistakes with our data center move planning and implementation services.

Data Center Knowledge does a great job of aggregating the downtime woes that continue to manifest in ways that should or could have been addressed.

There continues to be a lesson learned from decades of computing infrastructure knowledge that stubbornly refuses to translate into a lesson remembered.

Lesson Learned: Diversity Defeats Downtime

Within the data center, diversity principles include:

• Load Balancers that spread traffic to different servers
• Diverse power feeds to equipment
• Diverse network feeds to equipment

Geographic diversity means having the ability to run services or at least the ability to re-direct services to other data centers.

• No excuses for failing to diversify your external and internal DNS. Without a way to access your DNS records and re-direct your e-mail and web destinations, you are at the mercy of your provider should a service interruption strike.
• No excuses for failing to diversify your e-mail. You need to be able to send and receive e-mail during a major service interruption.
• No excuses for failing to have a Business Continuity Plan. As the downtime stories continue to illustrate, key elements of your plan need to include what you are going to do when your infrastructure is overwhelmed.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a rigorous approach to ensuring your business can continue to operate in the event of an unplanned outage. Despite all the attention to BCP, the lesson of Geographic Diversity continues to be a lesson learned but a lesson not remembered.

A transformer explosion at hosting company, The Planet in Houston,  on May 31, 2008 forced the company to take the entire facility offline until tests could be completed to allow the generators to supply power. This meant 9,000 servers were without power.

It simply is no longer sufficient to utilize a single location for your operations even if you have made that single location highly available.

If you can remember only one lesson in Geographic Diversity, remember to diversify your DNS at another location.

Attention to business resumption would lead you to conclude you need to do more than just provide for DNS diversity. Colorado is uniquely positioned to provide data centers that are geographically diverse from most locations in North America. While the debate continues about the required separation between data centers, consider there are 9,000 servers without power at a Houston data center. If some of them had geographic diversity even a few miles away, those businesses could have resumed their operations.

Many organizations fail to plan properly for the post-move phase. Circuits and facilities need to be decommissioned, rapid response teams need to be ready to resolve unforeseen problems, and executive management needs to provide the proper budget to this phase so that staff is not stretched to the breaking point.

Executives need to be aware that during this phase is often where they lose the most staff. This happens for a number of reasons including staff who believes they did not receive the proper recognition for their efforts during the move to those who were going to leave anyway. You need a post-move plan that goes beyond technology and addresses the organizational issues that a move uncovers.

The first step is to evaluate each individual on the likelihood of departure versus the impact to your organization. Performing this retention risk analysis prior to moving can help you retain the individuals who have the largest positive impact to your organization’s success.

As reported by Rich Miller at DataCenterKnowlege, forward-thinking Regional Economic Development Agencies are focusing on attracting large data center projects. The debate continues on the real economic impact after accounting for tax incentives and infrastructure improvements given the relatively small amount of jobs these large footprint data centers create. What many economic development agencies may not realize is that there are many more data center-related jobs at stake than the mega-projects most often reported in the media.

We move data centers of all sizes. Most data center moves are a result of a larger corporate relocation project which means jobs of many types will follow the data center move…not just the jobs to keep the data center running. What can economic development agencies do to highlight their region’s strengths?

1. Package Your Infrastructure - Power, Fiber, and Transportation needs to be readily available to the advance teams for evaluation.
2. Assess Your Available Inventory for Data Center Readiness - Your region can be quickly eliminated because you can’t provide an inventory of available properties that answer fundamental data center questions. Items such as existing data center raised floor height, generators, proximity to fiber paths, are but a few of the items a relocation team wants to know. Most commercial listing agents have no idea what type of data center space exists in their inventories.
3. Pre-form a Welcome Team - Advance evaluation teams get on airplanes to have a look. You can increase your odds with a multi-disciplinary Welcome Team to guide their evaluators and answer their questions. If you stuff this team with local politicos and Realtors, you’re missing an opportunity to put technical experts in front of the advance relocation evaluation teams.
4. Don’t Just Sit There - You can build all the FAQ pages, marketing collateral, and databases you want, but assuming a corporate relocation team is going to find you is a bad bet. Seek creative ways to let others know about your area including us. Send your information to dcmove@e-oasis.com. Also consider industry-specific conferences and trade shows to highlight your area.

Contact us to inquire about how we can help you with your Regional Economic Development efforts related to data center moves. We have a number of innovative services that can help you understand and attract organizations who relocate their data centers.