Project Description

Profile

MetroHealth is a public teaching hospital affiliated with Case Western Reserve University (CASE). Regionally and nationally recognized for excellence in providing comprehensive care to all people, it is the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the region. MetroHealth has an internationally recognized burn center and provides 13 inpatient and outpatient facilities throughout the Greater Cleveland center.

Client Environment

The environment consisted of a variety of distributed equipment such as IBM zSeries, pSeries, Sun, HP, Compaq, DEC, CISCO, and EMC.

The Challenge

The major goal was to make the data center relocation of all IT systems a “non-event” outside of the IT organization, while meeting all financial targets set for the project.  The project team was to develop strategies for hardware and network equipment relocations that would fit into existing maintenance windows.

This project included the development of the conceptual relocation plan for the new data center facility, which included the relocation of several clinical applications without major disruptions.

The Solution

To maintain the existing maintenance window, a twin-tailed approach had to be adopted.  Rack-mounted servers were re-racked in the months preceding the move to allow the rack move of the servers.  Stand-alone servers were asset-swapped to eliminate the physical movement of the large servers.

To allow a multiple-week data migration to occur, applications were completely mapped to determine dependencies.  This ensured that inter-dependent applications were moved together on the same weekend.

Critical Success factors

  • Adopted a proven data center relocation methodology and approach
  • Used a collaborative rather than directive approach
  • Brought resources when needed and on a timely basis
  • Used mitigating relocation risks as the guiding principle
  • Leveraged IT best practices in accomplishing the data center relocation

Interested in a data center relocation project for your company or firm? Altus Technologies has you covered. Learn about our history and expertise, then request a conversation with us to get your project started. Feel free to look-over this article on 5 Steps to Success for relocations & migrations while you are here!