Storage errors in the process of and merging data center migrating

Data center migration, in today's business environment, mergers and acquisitions are commonplace.

The key to a merger is how to combine the two companies' IT infrastructure.
IT departments play a key role in ensuring merger success, but IT is also the main reason for merger failure.
When companies rush to complete a merger, IT professionals often make seven common mistakes in storage.
Error 1 - rushed execution
The first mistake was rushed.
The first step in this process should be the scope of the IT department to provide digital assets for the merged enterprise.
This step includes the use of software solutions to store physical storage systems and data stored in these systems.
For the assessment of physical storage systems, count the types of brands, models, storage media, and which physical hosts are attached.
It should also provide information about the payload of each storage system.
The load is different from the available capacity, which involves the system supporting the busy degree of the attached host.
The goal of physical audit should be a strategy by the IT team to decide which storage systems need to be decommissioned and which systems can be used to increase the workload and should maintain their state.
For the evaluation of the data itself, the IT department should provide detailed information about the actual data being stored.
Companies are seeking to categorize data based on activity and importance.
In most cases, most data (over 85%) is non-active and can be used to archive storage or migrate to a lower-cost storage layer.
Identifying these data at this critical juncture is critical.
IT shows IT planners that they need to care about which blocks of data need to be stored and protected.
Error 2 - the IT department does not know the target
The second error is that the IT department implements the migration without understanding the various processes that the organization is running and the concerns of stakeholders.
IT is important to let the IT department participate in the discussion of system integration by stakeholders of all parties to understand their concerns and priorities.
The IT department and stakeholders not the reason for this discussion is that they are often in vain, because both of us don't have enough background information or for the future strategy put forward realistic point of view.
In order for these discussions to be productive, it is important to assess the steps before stakeholders participate.
At the end of the evaluation, the IT department should develop a basic strategy to determine which applications should and which applications should migrate.
The IT department needs to know exactly how to do this.
Essentially, IT departments want to start a conversation with the IT storage option by merging the results.
IT should be the starting point for dialogue between IT and stakeholders.
Likewise, it is important to have a conversation before applying any changes.
The feedback in these conversations will affect the actual execution.
Error 3: limit selection
Most businesses in the data center is a third of the mistakes made by merger, tried to merge into a data center, and even within the data center in a storage system, which limits their options.
In the past, this integration was driven primarily by technical limitations, because the interconnection of multiple data centers and the management of multiple storage systems were expensive and complex.
At present, enterprises have higher bandwidth, software definition network (SDN), and modern data management software, which can efficiently manage multiple storage systems of multiple data centers.
Organizations with multiple data centers usually have several advantages: first, there is a significant increase in the pool of potential employees.
Finding talented employees is always a challenge, regardless of the state of the business, and moving these workers to a centralized location can make things worse.
Remote office, however, cannot meet the demand, telecommuting workers need to directly access a specific application and data sets, in many cases, this means that companies need to build operating a localized data center.
The second benefit is to bring the data closer to the creation point.
Many industries create or collect data in particular areas.
In the media and entertainment industry, for example, the field service of the energy and exploration industry.
And if the data center is close to these locations, it can provide value in time.
Finally, these additional data centers can be more redundant because they can be backed up each other.
Other data centers can be replaced when a data center fails.
If IT implements technologies such as SDN and data management, the failover and recovery between these data centers is seamless.
The key to multi-site organization is to determine the role of each location and what data is required to support a particular role in a particular location.
IT teams don't let multi-site methods lead to low data efficiency.
Even in multi-site organizations there are opportunities to consolidate and optimize data storage.
Error 4 - move large amounts of messy data
Data centers for multi-site organizations still need to move data.
Businesses typically need to move data to another location for processing or storage, and there is a large amount of data removed from the current storage system.
In most data centers, at least 85% of the system data is not evaluated in a year.
Those inactive data should be validated to avoid errors such as "hasty execution".
The problem is how the enterprise handles all of these non-active data.
In fact, most of the data is likely to be deleted.
The problem is that some of the data is absolutely unobliterate and may be valuable in the future.
It is a difficult task to organize and delete data.
In many cases, these data are kept in a lower cost, safer storage medium, and all data will be saved.
However, this does not mean that all data should be stored on the main memory.
Secondary storage systems are specifically designed to store such data, such as Quantum's Lattus object store, Scalar tape library, and cloud services such as Glacier.
To reduce costs, they are stored using commoditized hardware and high-volume drives.
They also have data resiliency to ensure that stored data is not affected by storage media failures and data corruption.
The data management software solution is the key to implementing the advantages of the secondary storage system, which automatically moves the inactive data from the main storage to the secondary storage.
These solutions will also provide transparent access to the new location of the data so that the user can access it, just as it has never moved.
A combination of storage solutions can be a challenge because organizations require a cohesive strategy from different parts.
NAS storage systems, data management software, and several auxiliary storage (object, tape and cloud computing) layers.
Fortunately, the kunteng Artico device, which is supported by StorNext, provides front-end NAS data management capabilities and is able to connect to an object, tape, or cloud storage to achieve long-term data retention.
By using secondary storage system and data management solution, IT can be safely stored the active data, thereby significantly reducing the working set of data, can focus on the active data.
For example, in a data center with 500 terabytes of data, reducing the working set data to 75TB will make it easier to manage.
Error 5 - lack of operating costs
The fifth mistake most organizations make during the merger process is to assume that merging requires a lot of additional IT spending.
The implementation of the secondary storage system and data management software should save costs by freeing up the storage capacity of the main storage.
For years, many organizations did not need to purchase additional master storage devices.
The implementation of data management solutions should also be able to save operating costs.
IT department spend a certain amount of time to ensure the right data is stored in the correct storage, rebalancing storage resources, because the system run out of capacity or mobile data in order to obtain better performance.
Data management solutions can solve these problems automatically so that IT departments can solve other tasks.
Error 6 - endless upgrades
IT departments assume storage upgrade and update is the norm, especially in the merger, the "new system" may actually be the old system, and at the time of the merged enterprise may no longer need to another the old system.
In the past, moving data from the old system to the new system was a long and costly task.
Therefore, you must copy the data to the new system and then update the configuration file to indicate the new location of the data.
Using data management solutions like Artico, data can be automatically moved to a new system by data management software.
Since the data management solution is the central point of data positioning, no configuration files need to be updated.
The data is automatically moved to the new system without interrupting the user's application.
Error 7 - backup everything
Another corporate merger goal is the data protection process.
Organizations may spend too much time trying to choose a backup application to protect enterprise data.
While this effort is good, the reality is that most organizations need multiple applications to get the job done.
Some applications do better to protect certain runtime environments, but there are few applications that can protect all content well.
Data protection hardware is an area that can be integrated.
Data protection hardware is typically distributed in each data protection application.
Guentner DXI data protection equipment such as hardware solution enterprise all of the data protection applications can send data directly to a single device, integrate backup storage and improve the efficiency of auxiliary data storage.
These systems also have wide-area networks that can copy data to other sites, cross-replicate data between sites, and even copy data to the cloud.
By integrating backup storage, the IT department can start the process of choosing a single backup solution for the entire enterprise without pressure.
Because of the need for historical access, centralized storage solutions also allow the IT department to easily retain an instance of an existing backup application.
conclusion
The goal of a merger or acquisition is to make the combined enterprise business work better.
In other words, the target is 1 + 1 = 3 (or more).
IT deployment also has the same opportunity to create an IT organization that better responds to business needs.
First, it seems like a daunting task to deal with the data assets of both companies.
If IT deployed by establishing a powerful data management foundation and consolidate the backup to avoid these common errors in the merger of the so after the merger, will provide enterprises with a more powerful and efficient data center.