State Agency Data Center Migration

A large State Agency in Washington needed to migrate out of their existing data center prior to the expiration of existing support contracts on aging equipment.

Overview

A large State Agency in Washington needed to migrate out of their existing data center prior to the expiration of existing support contracts on aging equipment. At the same time, the agency wanted to use the opportunity to modernize their approach to data center management.

The Challenge

Differing parts of the IT organization had differing visions of the final solution. State policies were driving them toward cloud and state-run services, yet existing contracts and security requirements were driving some services to remain in-house. Work was delegated to several different managers depending on their primary skill sets (e.g., networking, hardware, cloud services, etc.). All the IT managers were extremely competent at their existing responsibilities, but each had a differing view on the final product. IT leadership at the time was in transition and there was a lack of a clear vision of future.

What was at Stake

The risk of missing the deadline was high – exposing the agency to “out of warranty” infrastructure and potential service delays if servers failed. After deciding to accept a certain degree of risk, the project plan was finalized, and the firm finish date was identified. Components of scope needed to be clearly defined and each phase delegated to a responsible lead manager. Dependencies between phases needed to be understood. Internal politics needed to be set aside as deadlines were looming.

The Solution

OTB provided an experienced Project Manager and Solution Architect to facilitate scope and timeline definition and to lead remaining project activities. Our PM was instrumental in bringing definition and clarity to the program scope. The final scope as brokered (and guarded) by Dale included:

Identified 39+ enterprise services to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Installed a new Nutanix environment in the local data center
Installed a new Nutanix environment at the state-run data center
Upgraded Network Infrastructure and configuration changes to support the new environments
Migrated 170+ servers to the Nutanix environments
Implemented new Backup and Recovery Services (Commvault) to support all environments

Results

At its successful conclusion, all project success measures were met which included the following:

Completed all inter-related initiatives on time and on budget.
Ensured infrastructure and data center upgrades were removed as roadblocks for dependent projects (i.e., Enterprise Data Warehouse).
Unified the IT leads under a single project banner to enhance teamwork and coordination.
Ensured efficacy of hyper-converged infrastructure based on Nutanix clusters located at local and State Data Center.
Migrated to storage backup solution based on Commvault with backup data stored in the cloud.
Continued AWS migrations at consistent pace to achieve organizational goals.
Migrated 98% of applications with no downtime.
Most migrations were seamless or transparent to end users.
End users felt they had been effectively communicated with and knew what was coming.

OTB’s Unique Approach

OTB’s Project Manager brought the typical project management tools as well as their depth of experience to this project. They:

United the team under a single program banner.
Brought resources out of their silos and led them as a team.
Introduced Agile methods and “live learning” to the project schedule.
Ensured the team hit its key dates and deadlines.
Introduced a formal work plan to make all related work transparent to the whole team.
Actively mitigated risks and other project collisions that were vying for IT resource time.
Reported on the project to oversight committees and helped sustain the project as a High priority initiative.
Analyzed resource allocations and made recommendations to eliminate wasted effort.