What is “Elemental“?

This tool is used to define, organize and track a migration project.

Elemental is – at its core – a very detailed relational database. It provides excellent views into the complexity and detail required to effectively inventory, assess, plan and execute a migration.   Elemental can be hosted in the Cloud or run on-premise in a virtual machine.

 

Elemental performs these critical functions:

Applications support the business and Elemental helps track applications (parent and child applications) as well as their dependencies and associations to the components.   Details about application usage, hours of operation, maintenance windows, diagrams and other information is collected and readily available in Elemental.  Application data that is collected can be dispersed to the application support teams where they can profile and approve or add to the information that has been collected.

Elemental organizes the infrastructure components which are physical or virtual servers, storage devices, network components (including firewalls, switches, load balancers) as well as blades, chassis and racks, etc.  Elemental can import these components directly from vCenter (for virtual) and ServiceNow or other CMDBs. This allows Elemental to keep a current inventory for the life of the migration project. Elemental can also import these components from spreadsheets or other data sources.

For physical components Elemental can depict the rack elevations.

Once the project is far enough along, components and applications are grouped together into planning groups called “Move Elements“.  These logical groupings are placed on a timeline defining each Event that will relocate the workload.  During each Event, a detail list of hand-offs is tracked with the “hour-by-hour” plan, which is viewable in Elemental.

Elemental collects and stores detailed information about the people needed to run the project.  Stakeholders, application owners, infrastructure teams and team members as well as application validators are stored in Elemental. This is also useful to define tasks, track and resolve issues, and identify and mitigate risks.

Elemental has a full function project management module that helps with assumptions (by team), issues and risks.  The issues and risks are tracked for the life of the project as well as during the intense Events used to migrate the workload.  Reports and graphs assist in running a smooth migration project.

If there are physical components moving as part of this project, Elemental’s Manifest system will track the scanning of component asset bar-codes as they leave the source site and are transported.  GEO tracking with a moving map is part of its dashboards. When the assets arrive at the target site, they are scanned again, updating the inventory records in Elemental.

Once workload has been migrated (physically or virtually) usually some kind of validation is performed to ensure it has completed properly.   Elemental tracks one or more validation steps for each application.  Automatic emails can be delivered when components come up.  Elemental can even perform automatic “system validation” by using “ping” or by particular web pages coming alive.  Once validation is complete, audit reports can be provided if needed.

Are we there yet?   As most IT folks know, performing migration tasks while informing management of the status of the tasks can be difficult to juggle.

With the detailed dashboards available in Elemental, teams and management as well as department stakeholders will always know where things stand.   Auto-updating of channels in Microsoft Teams (and other tools) can also be performed, if desired.

Summary

Elemental has been developed over the last decade based upon the experience of many migration projects. If you would like a live demo of Elemental, or to use Elemental for your own project, contact us for training and multi-level support for your migration project.

If you are a vendor who provides various migration services we are also able to provide Elemental for your projects.