What does Client HAVE?
You need to have a expert eye on judging and accessing client existing facility which you want to migrate. Some case you might not have existing one and planning to build a new one. In all cases, assessment is the key factor.
What does Client WANT?
Once assessment is for Data Center is done next step is to gather all information and propose comprehensive enterprise architecture. Harness latest tool to keep cost low at best quality. Centralize the facilities, Virtualizes servers, keep carbon foot print to minimal.
Following are some of questions which should have answer before you start:
• How many applications shall be hosted on how many servers?
• Can applications be virtualized?
• Do you need storage (SAN)?
• What kind of backup solution you have to plan?
• What kind of redundancy on network infrastructure need to have?
• What is Disaster Recovery Plan?
• What is recommended geographical location for data center?
• What is the road map of client/ organization for next few years ( for growth planning )?
These are only a few questions. You should come up with detailed questionnaire with client together all needed information.
Why does client WANT?
You are not very much concerned about why does client want this data center but by knowing the business sense of the entire project, enables you to make some critical decisions. For example if client is a bank, you have to plan high security measures and in real time response while if client is going to host a school website for e-learning, you will prefer better streaming of data and voice. Network, servers and other infrastructure shall be designed keeping all these parameter in consideration.
How you are going to achieve this?
Set baseline and streamline: Define standards for business processes, hardware, software, Vendors. Define business owners for quicker decision making and better management of processes. Follow standard and flows.
Choose Vendors and Partners: you are going to need some vendors and partner to help you to take care of sundry jobs for you like network cabling, racking stacking, fixing fire measures, power, UPS, physical security, access etc.
Control variances: As there are lots of people and efforts are being used to achieve development of data center, monitoring plays vital role here. You definitely don’t want to mesh up your project just because you didn’t monitor the milestone and had snag in deliverables.
Control budget: Budget variance is part of other variances but it shall be considered and tracked separately. Budget snag can bring your data center development in to risk.
What’s next?
Once development of data center is done, all designs, configurations, diagrams, plans, processes should be documented and handed over to client and operational teams. You should provide guidelines on providing operational support by the operation team.
What the hack is Disaster Recovery?
Have you given a consideration on what will happen if some disaster will happen and client business is on risk? Disaster can be of any nature, your development plan should take measures to mitigate disaster conditions. Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP) is planned to have minimum disruption on client business.
Conclusion
Your action plan for data center development shall streamline the design of next-generation data center to ensure the superior resiliency, performance, and agility that enterprise networks now require. The investment made by client to develop/build datacenter should justify in his business.
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