Relocation And Migration: Finding Your IT Movers
By Steve Blow, Zerto
The headache of moving is familiar to many. Finding the new place, packing up your belongings, figuring out how to get them across town — or even further away — can create chaos in day-to-day life. It is often a long, drawn out process, with many obstacles along the way — if you have a better experience of moving to a new house, I’d love to get some tips.
This scenario is now presenting itself as a familiar storyline in the IT world as well. Organizations embracing hybrid IT that requires workloads to be moved between infrastructures can often feel like they are packing up and moving to a new house on a regular basis, only to sometimes come back again. But with security, integration and protection concerns being front and center when it comes to movement, does it really make sense to take all of your workloads with you?
Location, Location, Location
As a rule, technology doesn’t sit still. And with an ever-increasing pace, organizations committed to digital transformation are looking to take advantage of new technologies as quickly as possible.
It’s always been the case that moving away from legacy technologies in favor of what’s new and better can be a struggle. Surely many IT teams have suffered their own form of PTSD after major migration projects. This has come to be accepted as norm, but it doesn’t have to be.
Moving forward, IT organizations need to be able to shift data and workloads confidently, seamlessly and with meteoric speed. This means moving workloads from server to server, from test environments to QA, from one data center to another or from AWS to Azure to on-premises and back again. Wherever workloads are moving, owners will expect it to be transparent and fast, while allaying any risk to the data that is being moved. That’s it; that’s all you need to do.
Choosing The Right Movers
The traditional method for system upgrades was generally the lift-and-shift method in which applications were lifted from old servers and placed into new hardware. The process, however, is labor- and time-intensive as well as filled with hazards. The problem with approaching upgrades this way is that a substantial amount of downtime is usually required and there are so many unknowns that it’s easy to slip up and fail in the initial attempts at major projects of this magnitude.
This becomes an even more critical capability as companies in every sector embrace software and applications as key business drivers. From retailers dependent on online sales, to banks that need the most up-to-date app to keep customers happy, workloads need to be moved around without interrupting the customer experience or incurring any downtime.
As this becomes more of a need, organizations must look to mobility solutions that are agnostic when it comes to hypervisor, storage and cloud. They must also be able to perform fail over, fail back and regression tests prior to the action.
Moving All In One
Every company has to transform and modernize its IT to achieve new levels of operational excellence and agility. This often means moving workloads. However, as noted this is no easy feat. Most organizations already have too many technology stacks in their environment, but they also want to leverage the cloud, adding even more complexity with hybrid and multi-cloud. Is it possible to take all of your data from these disparate workloads and put it into various public and private clouds to embrace this strategy?
Add to this the growing concern over security and often have to adhere to strict compliance rules. How do you transform with all of this in mind when you cannot afford any downtime?
Essentially, employing a technology that can migrate workloads to the desired location with resilient countermeasures to protect against the impact of these changes is the key.
Using point solutions for migration, protection and resilience harkens back to the lift and shift manual movement of workloads that was clunky, risky and complex. Trying to combine business continuity and disaster recovery with a separate backup product linked to the cloud infrastructure solution that enables hybrid cloud is asking for trouble. And these products will likely overlap in some areas, adding another possible level of confusion.
Just like moving to a new house, once you have hired the movers to come in, pack everything, load it onto a truck and deliver it to your new house, it is hard to go back to DIY moving. The same can be said for moving and protecting workloads to embrace a new infrastructure model – find a tool that does it all. You want to be able to easily move a workload to a new site or to the cloud for any reason deemed important to the business. And as your IT infrastructure grows more flexible, you want to feel assured that all workloads, no matter where they reside, are protected, can be recovered at any time and can always be moved again with ease.
Although a lot of us hate moving, it is simply a fact of life — and IT. In the same way you vet a mover who will be handling all your worldly possessions, find the right tool that will pack your workloads safely in bubble wrap, handle them with care and get them to the infrastructure they need to be in on time.
About The Author
Steve Blow is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto. Among other things, he is responsible for both helping customers succeed in their digital transformation journeys using Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform. Steve has a particular interest in automation, particularly all things API.
Using his passion for technology Steve works with clients to help optimize their IT strategies, and make sure customers understand how Zerto can bolster a mobility, backup or disaster recovery strategy. Steve’s main initiative and biggest focus is on driving and ultimately seeing real improvements come to fruition for organizations.
Prior to becoming a Technology Evangelist, Steve was responsible for helping customers to identify the technical requirements for their business and overcome technology challenges, and managing the technical onboarding globally for Zerto within IBM resiliency services. Steve has over 14 years’ industry experience in IT solutions architecture, design, engineering and support.