Now is the season for migrations.

Not just for those of monarch butterflies, traveling herds of caribou and flights of ruby-throated hummingbirds. It’s the time for migrations of data centers as well. 

As in massive migrations.

With many experts estimating that as much as 80% of all data centers will be significantly changed or relocated by the year 2025 it’s clear that everything digital is on the move.

There are so many trends and varying options facing heated boardroom discussions including on-prem, hyperscale, edge, cloud and colocation. Whatever choices larger companies are facing, fewer are choosing to stay still.

Speaking of herds of caribou, standing still is a great way to get trampled over when it comes to data infrastructure.

The latest estimates are there will be 200 zettabytes in the cloud in just a few years. For those of you counting at home, each of those zettabytes is equal to a trillion gigabytes.

So, with everything on the move, how is everything going to get moved?

This is our daily task and obsession at Instor Solutions. Although we assist firms in ground up data center builds, much of what we do is managing and implementing the migration of data centers from one facility to another. Or in the case of multi-site locations, to multiple facilities.

We’ve been doing this for so long now that we have answers to most all questions when it comes to data center migration, but we still have one that baffles us.

That is, “Why would a company handle migration internally on their own?”

These moves require a level of sophistication and technical expertise. Many firms who choose to handle these moves in-house are facing their first ever migration. We’ve completed several hundred through the years and even with our vast experience there are new challenges being faced every day.

Many of these require innovative, rapid and seasoned responses.

Our Vice Present of Data Infrastructure Services, Darrell Reynolds, is often busy assisting with these moves and is well familiar with the main concern of our customers.

“The biggest questions we’ll get at the beginning are those impacting the end game of the move,” Reynolds said.

“They want to know what the downtime is going to look like during the migration. That seems to always be the greatest concern and it’s something we work on meticulously to get right.”

The difference in measuring downtime in minutes, hours, days and even weeks is business critical and should be central to any cost decision.

That’s not all. The price tag of migration should not only be calculated by the significant costs of systems downtime. Another key factor is the downtime experienced by your internal organization.

With staffing obstacles being as they are these days, having to tie up your facilities and information technology teams on such a complicated task as migration can set your organizational objectives back for many months.

Our data center migration experts are flexible in how they can provide services. Sometimes, we’re brought on board to essentially provide an experienced hand. Other times, companies are trusting us to handle almost every aspect of their migration.

“In many cases we’re taking a broad consultative approach,” Reynolds said. “We’re providing a full discovery from their existing facility and identifying what’s moving and what’s being decommissioned. We’re physically tracing cables and equipment and often are providing months of planning with their network engineers and server teams to ensure as smooth of a migration as possible. Finally, we’re implementing the hands-on aspects of the move.”

Almost all larger companies will be impacted by the massive migration of data centers over the course of the next few years. If you’re planning on making your move soon, we would enjoy having a discussion with you.

There are some things that should never be done alone. I would encourage you to add data center migration to that list.