Every major initiative for optimizing data center performance, decreasing TCO, increasing ROI, or maximizing productivity – including consolidation, virtualization, clouds, server upgrades, tiered storage, data analytics and BI tools – involves storage data migration.
Data has an incalculable value, and its loss can have significant impact. As Frost & Sullivan says in a recent Executive Brief, “one would expect that storage data migrations should be approached with the same attention a museum lavishes on a traveling Rembrandt exhibit.” To expand on this, in 2012 it was estimated that $8 billion dollars worldwide was spent in data migration services.
A research white paper published in December 2011 entitled “Data Migration – 2011″ by Philip Howard from Bloor Research shows the average cost for a data migration project is $875,000, so to extrapolate the value and criticality on these types of projects should be fairly straightforward. Overrunning project budget, or rolling back a failed migration due to lack of planning, are normal occurrences – in fact this same study proposes that the average cost of a project overrunning its budget is $268,000.00 – approximately 30% of the average cost of a data migration project.
Between 1999 and 2007, 84% of data migrations went over budget and overtime; this is astronomical and costly – and it can get very tricky when trying to pinpoint just why did the data migration project go over budget and over time. More often than not, it is usually down to lack of experience and planning (and I do believe that experience and planning should come in the same sentence.)
And there are potentially serious risks involved. Recent studies show that migration projects nearly always have unwanted surprises: 34% of migrations have data missed or loss, a further 38% have some form of data corruption.
And probably the biggest risk associated with migrations is that 64% of migration projects have unexpected outage/downtime. Now, tie this back to a research paper put forward by Vision Solutions in 2011, which shows that the typical cost of downtime can reach nearly 6.5 million dollars per hour for some in the Brokerage service industry, and up to 2.8 million dollars per hour for those in the Energy Industry. To really understand this and put it in context, let’s have a look at some of the reasons why we migrate.
Why do we migrate data?
The migration of data isn’t typically something an IT manager or CIO does for fun, end of the day it will cost money and time. Ageing infrastructure or the need for a particular technology feature that’s not available on the current infrastructure are just a couple of the reasons why people migrate. In my experience, it’s all of the above. CIO’s are constantly (or should be) looking at new and innovative ways to reduce footprint and drive down environmental costs, such as data centre space and power, as well as expose newer and greater technological advancements within a given product set. Newer product releases for infrastructure seldom take a step back when it comes to form factor and power draw.
So do customers who perform migrations achieve their overall goals? Not exactly…As I mentioned above, those undertaking DIY migrations typically have surprises which result in a heavier investment in staff to try and remediate those surprises, subsequently resulting in a project budget that is exceeded. Yes, 54% of the time a project budget is overrun due to these challenges but I’m not here to throw stats at you – I’m here to raise the awareness that if not properly planned and executed, your data migration project (as big or small as it may be) will run into at least one of these surprises.
HP Data Migration Services can help you address those challenges and risks. Each data migration project has astorage and data migration project manager assigned to make sure everything goes smoothly. We understand that storage infrastructures are typically multivendor, which is why our service is vendor-agnostic. We work to keep costs down and help you avoid the common pitfalls and risks of data migration.
To learn more about the new HP Data Migration Service, check out this online presentation. You’ll learn about the typical project flow and your migration technology options. Data migration is not usually just a simple copy-and-paste exercise.
Read more about HP Storage Migration Consulting.
You can learn more about ways to ease the pain of data migration at HP Discover 2013.
