Many IT organizations are under constant pressure to cut costs, increase efficiency, and streamline processes. This can pose a real challenge for data center managers who must simultaneously make their infrastructure more cost-effective and easier to manage. Fortunately, there are many simple steps you can take to make the data center transition easier—and in some cases even completely painless! Here are five tips that will help make the transition process easier:
Know The Basics
Every organization has different needs when it comes to their data center environment. While you may be in a position to make major changes to the infrastructure and hardware that supports your operations, stepping outside of your comfort zone can help you to better identify areas where minor adjustments can go a long way. A careful review of your organization’s needs will help you to identify the key factors you’ll want to focus on during the transition. If you are transitioning from in-house to an external data center, the most important thing to consider is the type of network and connectivity required to support your operations.
If you have a large, complex environment, you may need an extremely robust network that supports a high bandwidth and low latency environment. You may also need to be very flexible and able to move quickly, since you may need to accommodate the needs of an ever-changing customer base that wants varying amounts of bandwidth at different times of the day.
Build A Baseline And Track Data
Once you have your network requirements identified, you can work with your IT department to build a baseline. This will help you to set a baseline for all future data center infrastructure changes and track the amount of data that flows through your network. This data can help you to identify certain bottlenecks and issues within your infrastructure that you’ll want to address before the transition is complete. At the same time, it can also help you to identify certain opportunities. For example, if you have 10 Gigabit connectivity throughout your facility, you may want to use this as a baseline for the rest of your infrastructure. This can help you to track the amount of data flowing through your network, and provide you with some key insights that can help you to better plan your data center transition.
Automate Everything You Can
Automation is one of the most effective ways to reduce data center costs. At the same time, it can help to improve infrastructure reliability and increase the level of availability that your organization can achieve. If your organization is already focused on transforming its infrastructure to support new DevOps and automation processes, you can use the data center transition as an opportunity to automate some of your processes. For example, you may have a manual process that involves mapping out a virtual machine’s lifecycle
and mapping out the power and cooling requirements. With modern equipment and automation, this process can be automated. This can help to reduce the amount of human error that often occurs during the transition process and increase the reliability of the entire process.
Be Flexible And Adaptive
The transition process will almost certainly force you to make changes to your operations that you may not have wanted to make. For example, you may have planned to migrate one set of hardware to support certain workloads, but now you’ll need to support a different set. The best way to deal with this is to be flexible and adaptive. Work with your team to identify key areas where you’ll need to make adjustments. At the same time, keep an eye out for opportunities to automate some of the manual processes that are involved in the transition process. Automation can help to reduce the time and effort required to make these adjustments while also helping to ensure that you have the reliability and availability of your data center infrastructure.
Look For Opportunities For Better And Easier Workflows
As you make the transition to an external data center, keep an eye out for opportunities to transform your operations with AI and automation. This can help to reduce the time and effort required to make key network and infrastructure adjustments. For example, with AI-powered monitoring tools, you can identify when your IT team needs to make key adjustments to your network. The same is true for monitoring and discovering tools in the data center that can help you to more easily navigate your IT infrastructure during the transition process.
By using automation and algorithms to automate these tasks and workflow, you can significantly reduce the amount of time and effort required to make these adjustments. These tips and strategies will help to make your data center transition easier and less costly. By applying the right techniques and strategies, you can improve your data center infrastructure and make the most of the hardware that has been delivered to the facility. If you are planning a major data center transformation, you’ll want to take the time to identify your key requirements and make sure that you’re making the most of the hardware that has been delivered.
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