My Anaheim SHARE session "15043: zEC12 User Experiences", while ostensibly a hardware discussion, focuses heavily on my first-ever experience of moving production processing to a brand new data center. This project was far more complicated and troublesome than any previous move I'd ever done, which had always entailed moving systems from one data center to another mature one. Some additional observations.
-- It makes a big difference if the production move is a one-for-one relocation of discrete components, or a merger into an existing environment. Merger is far more complicated. If there is any choice, move first discretely in a big bang with a minimal outage, then merge later in a gradual process. -- If possible use some kind of DASD mirroring (we have XRC) to populate the new location. Years ago, before mirroring was available, I moved a complex from Phoenix to Seattle using one-off copies of full-volume backup tapes airlifted (!) from city to city. Step up to paying for whatever mirroring will cost. -- For the new data center, other than contractors brought in to perform infrastructure preparation, our own staff did pretty much everything with a lot of advice from vendors, especially IBM. Not every shop is fortunate to have talent with time enough to pull it off, but previous internal relocation projects had honed us for this new task that none of us had ever experienced first hand. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 626-302-7535 Office 323-715-0595 Mobile [email protected] From: Gabe Goldberg <[email protected]> To: [email protected], Date: 05/12/2014 05:25 PM Subject: Query for Destination z website -- relocating a data center Sent by: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> Have you moved a data center? What was involved? How much "fun" was it? What was involved, from start to finish? Does the old disruption rule, "two moves equals one fire" apply? Please share lessons learned, gotchas suffered or avoided, "if only" wishes, war stories, etc. Here's some thinking points (not necessarily in project order, listed for completeness)... * Was the move worse than an data center build, initial installation, or upgrade? * Planning * Schedule, timeline, milestones * Logistics * DIY move vs. contractors/subcontractors * Site preparation, e.g., check outlet before plugging in anything too stupid to protect against bad circuit. I saw one vendor's (not IBM) equipment burned out when field manager didn't check power. * Achieving non-stop operation or outage tolerable? * Business continuity during execution * Flexibility during execution * Move equipment vs. install all new? * Incremental move or big-bang cutover? * Parallel operation of old/new data centers? * Back-out plan or point-of-no-return? * Transition period? * Testing * Software licensing * Costs * Results, assessment, postmortem, etc. As usual, please copy reply to me so it's not lost in list digest. Thanks... -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. [email protected] 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold Twitter: GabeG0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
