Large Scale Data Centre Transformation Programme
The Situation
A large IT services MSP had grown via acquisition, resulting in data centre footprints spanning 7 facilities across the UK. To realise synergy savings, a plan was devised to close 5 of these data centres and consolidate down to just 2 strategic facilities in London and Birmingham resulting in an annual operating saving of £2.5M.
The Task
- Devise the consolidation strategy
- Present the business plan
- Design the solution
- Build the delivery team
- Project manage the execution
- Maintain Stakeholder Communications
The Action / Approach
- Produce Business Case including Capital Investment and Opex Saving, Produce Project Plan and Secure CEO / COO approval to Execute Plan
- Build Team of Architects, Operations Engineers and Project Managers
- Built new SD-WAN to connect the 7 sites and facilitate virtualised workload migration between facilities
- Build two new VMWare Private Cloud Facilities with capacity for 500 virtual servers in each of the target, end state Data Centres
- Liaise with Clients on Relocation of Colocated Equipment
- Retain & Manage Data Centre Equipment Relocation Vendor
- Coordinate Migration of Network, Physical Equipment and Virtualise Workloads between Facilities
The Result
The plan was successfully delivered over a period of 18 months, with the migration and closure of five data centres into two regionally diverse facilities