assignment 2
BUSINESS CASE FOR RELOCATION OF PLANET INC. DATA CENTRE 1
Business Case for Relocation of Planet Inc. Data Centre from California to Austin, Texas
Angela Brogsdale
Business Case for Relocation of Planet Inc. Data Centre from California to Austin, Texas
Planet Inc. is a well-established company providing various comprehensive services like; data back up and storage, call center services, controlled internet access, load balancing, hosting services, data recovery services, housing of critical applications, managed E-mail messaging, user authentication, power distribution among other services. Planet Inc. is therefore a very critical service provider to various businesses including a government agency in California.
The company has reached a decision to relocate its data center from California to Austin, Texas and this process is required to occur seamlessly to ensure minimum impact on customers. This is because if the migration causes significant downtime, it will put the company in a difficult position with its customers as well as cause various losses. The project objective is therefore to ensure that the data center is moved from the current location and settled to its destination causing minimum downtime and ensure that customers are able to enjoy a more powerful and robust infrastructure after completion of the process.
Planet Inc. has been providing its services without problems until recently when the data center was hacked causing various disturbances and losses to customers. This happened one month after yet another incidence where thieves had physically broken into the data center and gained access to various machines. There have been increased cases of hacking of IT systems and the company has taken every step to make sure that its infrastructure is safe. The company also plans to take this opportunity to carry out system upgrade to ensure up-to-date software and hardware for effective prevention of infiltration (Chen, Jin, Wen and Leung, 2013). However, there are key difficulties in the current location and it is also hard to secure the building since it is shared with many other companies. Moving to a different location is therefore the ideal solution to the current problems.
Objectives articulation
Security is a major consideration going forward because the company has faced key threats by hackers and despite the fact that no personal identification information was stolen during two security breach incidences, it is now critical that the current infrastructure must be upgraded. Therefore, the migration will also be accompanied by upgrading of various systems and components. To ensure complete solution to the current problems, the company needs to take complete control of the data center and end all deals which involved outsourcing of services. This calls for purchase of machines and design of a modern data center in the new location. Key advantages of this move include; lower operation costs, better physical security of the data center in a building that is owned by Planet Inc., better online security using robust and modern IT infrastructure, attract more clients due to the security measures in place and also better prices offered to customers. This means that the company will be able to compete confidently with bigger players in the industry.
Opportunity Statement
Planet Inc. is currently experiencing key security threats to its IT infrastructure with a recent hacking attempt and a case of unauthorized access of the data center by unknown people. This puts the security data and machines into question in the current location. As a result of this situation, key customers including a California government agency have put the company on notice that they may be considering using services from other companies because they are worried about the security of their data. This has therefore resulted to reduced number of clients and also a low number of new subscriptions. The company may be forced out of market if nothing is done to correct the problems and reassure clients of the security of their data. This translates to low sales and low income for the company and therefore inability to effectively pay workers and meet running expenditure. The desired state is a physically secure Data center running on modern robust infrastructure with top notch security features preventing unauthorized access, proper cooling efficiency, scalability, enough space to warranty flexibility and capacity adjustment which are the desirable qualities of modern data centers (Mai et al., 2013).
Preliminary Project Requirements
The migration to Austin, Texas will be a complex process which requires a lot of preparation to make sure that services are not greatly degraded. The clients will therefore be informed about the migration but they will only feel it on their systems for a short duration even though the entire project will take 30 working days. Considering the kind of job to be done, this project will be carried out in various stages. The first stage will be preparation and this main work is identification of the project sponsor and the formulation of the initial project team. This team will then need to come up with the project charter working in liaison with the project manager. The second key stage will involve defining project scope and the preliminary budget. This stage will also involve generating a high level schedule and also establishing the required quality standards (Li, Yang and Yuan, 2011). The third stage will involve identification of risks and subsequent documentation with their mitigation measures. At the fourth stage the initial project plan will be generated by identifying all stakeholders and defining their high level roles in the project as well as developing the proper communication channels to be used. The fifth stage for the preliminary work will involve sourcing of resources required in the project and getting approvals.
High Level Estimates
The project scope has two main components which include the timeframe as well as the actual budget estimate. The project has been allocated a time frame of 30 working days and this duration is distributed carefully to ensure that the impact of migration on the client end will only be felt for a few days. A budget of $900,000 million is reserved for the project. The migration and upgrade of the data center will occur at once and because Planet Inc. has already purchased a building will enough space the allocated budget is for migration and upgrading of the systems.
Budget Estimates
Physical transport of servers, other machines, workers as well as company vehicles will cost $100,000. Purchase of new machines and servers will cost $500,000, technical designs implementation of hardware will cost $100,000 and general technical labor will cost $100,000. Monitoring intrusion and maintenance cost is $50,000.
Schedule estimates for project completion include the following;
Copying of vital data to various portable media to take 3 days, 2 days for transportation, 2 days to make data copies and crosscheck, one day for identification of hardware, 3 days for summary generation, presentation and entering of orders. 5 days for order processing and delivery, 3 days for network configuration, 3 days for detailed firewall and IPS configuration and 3 days for evaluation and report generation. This means it will take approximately 25 working days.
Threats
The project I subject to various threats and these form the main risks. First risk is logical risks where equipment and machines may go unlabeled, secondly is possible data corruption during migration, failure of machines to work normally after migration, IT infrastructure not responsive as required after moving, loss of various key information like passwords and security documents (Li, Yang and Yuan, 2011), failure of new purchased machines to smoothly configure into the old ones (Varasteh and Goudarzi, 2015). Other risks are based on the management end and include; poor planning, inadequate communication, inadequate definition of requirements and project creep. Others include inadequate testing resources, failure of systems leading to extended downtime and insufficient budget. Technical risks include; incorrect designs, fails in IP address and incorrect hardware purchase. Site risks in the new location include wrong or incorrect power cabling, failure to meet requirements or wrong requirements.
Assumptions
The new location is a building owned by Planet Inc., 30 days project timeline does not have a special consideration for weekends and is all assumed to be in continuous working days, the project team is only made up of experts in their specific fields who understand this process very well. The resources allocated for the project are availed to the team without delay.
References
Chen, M., Jin, H., Wen, Y., & Leung, V. C. (2013). Enabling technologies for future data center networking: a primer. Ieee Network, 27(4), 8-15.
Li, W., Yang, Y., & Yuan, D. (2011, December). A novel cost-effective dynamic data replication strategy for reliability in cloud data centres. In 2011 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (pp. 496-502). IEEE.
Mai, L., Rupprecht, L., Costa, P., Migliavacca, M., Pietzuch, P., & Wolf, A. L. (2013, August). Supporting application-specific in-network processing in data centres. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM (pp. 519-520).
Varasteh, A., & Goudarzi, M. (2015). Server consolidation techniques in virtualized data centers: A survey. IEEE Systems Journal, 11(2), 772-783.