Three risks and Countermeasures for data center migration

Three risks and Countermeasures for data center migration

Data center migration is a complex project and may be difficult to explain to executives who allocate funds for the migration activities. It is necessary to understand and manage relevant business operation risks. Next we will analyze several problems and risks related to data center management.

Service Availability

The main purpose of a data center is to host applications that provide services for businesses. Whenever you consider migrating from one data center to another, you must first consider the availability of the underlying service. These services include infrastructure applications such as activity directories and customer-oriented applications such as SAP.

When a service is transferred from one data center to another, you must develop a policy that takes into account the specific service migration and application dependencies on each other. A common practice to ensure service availability is to create a Migration Group and then group the applications that depend on each other into the same group.

A common practice for services that support most enterprise applications, such as active directories and DNS is to expand these core services across data centers. The service is still in the data center on both sides until the migration is complete.

Hardware migration

There are two policies for migrating physical servers: one is "lift and shift" and the other is "Data Replication. In the translation policy, the hardware is placed on the active card and then installed in the new data center. The system has been backed up before moving to a new address, but this policy brings some risks.

One of the biggest risks is that physical servers may be damaged during the handling process, and damage during the handling process may make backup useless. Another challenge is that the two data centers are too far apart. Therefore, this method is unrealistic and cannot guarantee that the service is available within an acceptable period of time.

The second strategy is to migrate data through a leased line. Two sub-swing hardware solutions are provided for leased lines. One solution is to migrate data from a physical machine to a physical machine (P2P. P2P migration requires the purchase of similar hardware so that the applications and hardware of the original data center can be migrated over, while ensuring the minimum downtime.

Another hardware migration solution is physical machine to Virtual Machine (P2V) conversion. P2V needs to switch physical machines to virtual machines through leased lines. P2V aims to achieve two goals: the first goal is to migrate workload from one data center to another, while ensuring the lowest hardware cost. The second goal is to achieve data center transformation by moving to a virtual platform. P2V migration is a popular solution because many engineers are used to performing such conversions, which was part of the previous data center project.

Data Migration

Migrating application data from one place to another may be one of the most complex steps of the data center migration project. A simple solution is to perform tape-or hard disk-based backup and recovery. However, similar to translation migration, backup and recovery provide limited capabilities for timely recovery services. In addition, backup and recovery are not the best method for data migration-they are more suitable for disaster recovery scenarios with limited data recovery solutions.

The main method selected for most data migration is to configure a lease line. If there is a dedicated connection between the two data centers, the Migration team can fully utilize the hardware or software-based synchronization mechanism to perform data migration. In addition to data migration, this method can also be used for P2P migration, P2V migration, and virtual machine-to-Virtual Machine (V2V) migration.

Many enterprises decide to have multiple connections between two data centers. A connection requires at least two lines: one connection supports traffic from common end users and data centers to data centers, so as to support traffic from applications such as active directories and applications to applications; second, usually faster connections are used for data synchronization. Dual-connection prevents two completely different types of traffic from interfering with or affecting the other party.