Similar to moving house, moving data centre can be daunting, there are risks, though if something breaks in transit the price is a lot higher than smashing your wedding china.
1. Cost savings
When you’re on a deadline to move out of the office and return the equipment, the wedding china is only a small part of a complex puzzle. For example, Fuji Xerox found themselves on the raw end of a 3-million-dollar penalty if the office and data centre were not available and returned to their original state by the end of the contract.
On a project like this, focus and leadership are of paramount importance, the time constraints along with 6 disparate vendors involved in various aspects of the project meant the PMs had to be both strong and decisive whilst also capable of smoothing over the waters particularly given some of the strong personalities on the engineering teams assigned to the project.
Under our management, the project was delivered on time but 20% under budget.
2. Consolidated infrastructure
By consolidating (through decommissioning and virtualisation), we drastically reduced the footprint of infrastructure which required hosting. As such, were able to leverage the pre-existing Fuji Xerox Document Management Solutions data centre in Moorebank, resulting in reduced power and cooling than had we stayed running isolated data centres.
3. Hardware stability
As a result of our decisive approach on the project, legacy hardware was decommissioned, meaning all remaining hardware is now under manufacturer’s warranty.
Change control was essential to this to this project and our reputation for governance and risk mitigation strategies enabled us to distinguish the pain points, ensuring that there was clear visibility of the project, both upstream to the project steerco by way of short, concise reporting managed by exception, as well as with the engineering team through daily stand-ups, war rooms as well as visible timelines on the wall with post-it notes – an archaic but tried and tested approach.
If you’re looking for consultancy services for your next project contact Starboard IT to find out what we can do for you.
