Data center migration of a Storage error during the merge process

Data center migration, in today's business environment, mergers and acquisitions are commonplace.The key to corporate consolidation is how to combine the IT infrastructure of the two companies.IT departments play a key role in ensuring the success of the merger, but IT is also the main reason for the failure of the merger.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 that IT departments can provide the scope of 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 evaluation of physical storage systems, you should 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's support for the busy degree of the attached host.
The goal of the physical audit should be to develop a strategy for 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 of the data (over 85%) is inactive 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 what data blocks they need to care about and need to store and protect.
Error 2 - the IT department does not know the target.
The second error is that the IT department performs migration without understanding the various processes that the organization is running and the concerns of stakeholders.IT is important for the IT department to participate in the discussion of system integration by stakeholders 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 be located and which applications should be migrated.The IT department needs to know exactly what this means.
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.Similarly, it is important to have a conversation before any changes are applied.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 motivated primarily by technical constraints, 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, the pool of potential employees increases significantly.Finding talented employees is always a challenge, regardless of the state of the business, and moving them 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 specific areas.For example, live shooting in the media and entertainment industry, on-site service in energy and exploration industries.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.In the event of a failure in a data center, other data centers can be replaced.If IT implements technologies such as SDN and data management, the failover and recovery between these data centers are seamless.
The key to multi-site organization is to determine the role of each location and what data is needed to support a particular role in a particular location.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 a lot of messy data.
The data center of the multi-site organization still needs to move data.Companies 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 "rushed execution".
The problem is how companies deal with all these inactive data.In fact, most of the data may be deleted.The problem is that some of the data is absolutely unobtainable and may be valuable in the future.It is a difficult task to organize and delete data.In many cases, these data are stored in lower-cost, safer storage media, and all the data will be saved.However, this does not mean that all data should be stored on main memory.
The secondary storage system is dedicated to storing such data, such as Quantum's Lattus object store, Scalar tape library and Glacier cloud services.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 realizing the advantage of the secondary storage system, which will automatically move inactive data from the primary 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.
The 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 (objects, tapes, 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 objects, tapes, 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 number of working sets to 75TB would 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 consolidation requires a large amount of additional IT spending.The implementation of secondary storage systems and data management software should save costs by freeing up the capacity on the main storage.For years, many organizations did not need to buy additional primary storage devices.
The implementation of data management solutions should also 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, enabling the IT department to 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 time-consuming task, with a high probability of error.You must therefore copy the data to the new system and update the configuration file to indicate the new location of the data.
Using data management solutions like Artico, data can be automatically moved from the data management software to the new system.Since the data management solution is the central point of the data location, 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 the enterprise data.While this effort is good, the reality is that most organizations need multiple applications to get the job done.Some applications are better at protecting certain runtime environments, but there are few applications that can well protect all content.
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-copy data between sites, and even copy data to the cloud.
By integrating backup storage, IT departments can start the process of choosing a single backup solution for the entire enterprise without pressure.Because of the need for historical access, the centralized storage solution also allows 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 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 a daunting task to deal with two companies' data assets.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.