Data Center Consolidation and Moving Targets
My career in IT has frequently consisted of projects with various flavours of Transition, Consolidation and Migrations, and each one of these projects has had their fair share of unknowns. Typically the risks in these types of projects all stem from a lack of documentation, these risks lead to questions such as: "Which applications are running on what servers?", "What type of workloads do we have in our east cost data center?" and as more is known, the much anticipated: "What are the dependencies of application XYZ within (and beyond) our infrastructure?". ...sound familiar?
We tend to solve these by means of network based discovery, reverse-engineering applications and finally by asking pointed questions to their administrators/users (once they are identified). In organizations where documentation has been lax, for whatever reason, the first step in any of these Transition/Consolidation/Migration/Rationalization projects is to assess the environment(s) and build that understanding of your infrastructure and the applications supported by it - ultimately creating Configuration Items (CIs) in a modern CMDB.
When done properly with a splash of business process reengineering, we leave the IT organization with the capability of "Living Documentation", and they never get into this mess again.
Today while reading this article: "How do you overlook 3,000 datacenters", I realized that we have a ways to go with our promotion of the Living Documentation solution!
Now, I have yet to experience as great a challenge as the US federal government is undertaking, granted, but I would love to help them from having to produce quotes like this:
"...after three years there were still no good, hard numbers on the total number of datacenters in use."
