When it comes to moving a live data center that is supporting a nearly $20-billion corporation, things change daily. So even though the team overseeing EMC Corporation’s transfer of data to a new data center 600 miles away spent 12 months in a discovery process to hone our migration strategy, the process is still a bit of a moving target.

With so many moving pieces, the fact is—as the saying goes—you don’t know what you don’t know with this kind of project.

One of the challenges to keep in mind when migrating to a data center like this is that it’s not just for today. The capital investment is huge, and migrating a data center takes months of planning and many more months to implement.

Nonetheless, we have achieved great success in data migration from Westborough, MA, to our new Durham, N.C., data center in 2011. We are primed to complete the migration process by September of 2012.

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Here is the latest update on our migration  to the Durham Cloud Data Center.  The Data Center is “live” and running production applications.  The bundling process (what applications must migrate together) has been completed.  This turned out to be more complicated than we had originally planned because of the high level of virtualization and consolidation (Data Base Grids) within our data centers.

Our first attempt at bundling was centered on the applications themselves.  Focusing the bundles on specific applications that must move together made perfect sense and, for the most part it, was always the way it was done.   When we were finished with our first pass it turned out that we had a handful of really, really large move events.  Because we are 75% Virtualized and have 8 Data Base Grids (4 SQL and 4 Oracle), we ended up with just about everything connected to everything!

We went back to the drawing board.  Because we had all the data in the MAD (Migration Access Database) we were able to re-bundle, focusing on the 8 Data Base Grids this time.   The team worked through all the application interdependencies and multi-tenant environments and came up with 21 distinct migration events that have been scheduled through 2012.  As of July 15^th 2011 we have completed six events which represent 15% of the overall environments.
 

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