ZENfra – The A to Z of Faster Data Center Migration

Data center migration is a time-consuming task that can lead to downtime, increased costs and delays to critical company projects and business processes. Migration consists of many small, repetitive tasks across complex infrastructures that must be completed quickly and accurately.

Successful data center migrations are based on the availability of comprehensive, accurate information on inventory and dependencies, together with a detailed, action-oriented project plan and reporting mechanism.

The same requirements are essential for IT teams carrying out infrastructure assessments as a basis for optimizing the cost, efficiency and performance of existing data centers.

Reduced Time and Costs

However, traditional project management approaches can be slow and potentially inaccurate because of infrastructure complexity and the risk of human error.

To speed up the process and ensure a successful transition, many IT teams have turned to data center migration automation tools that reduce risk, minimize disruption and lower costs.

Migration automation tools provide essential support at each stage of the process from data collection and processing to project management and reporting. To help clients, VTG has developed its own proprietary migration tool, ZENfra.

Automated Data Collection

Migration tools like ZENfra reduce the complexity of data capture and avoid the risk of human error by automating the collection of data from log files. This approach eliminates the need for agents to collect information.

The log files are uploaded quickly and easily to ZENfra and the tool keeps multiple data-points for comparison based on the date and time. These tools can carry out vendor-specific log file analysis or customize data collection to meet specific migration requirements.

ZENfra processes the log file and creates a database with the required information. The database can be easily modified to add additional data fields.

Analysis and Reporting

To help IT teams carrying out an infrastructure assessment or planning migration, automation tools like ZENfra provides detailed analysis and reporting capabilities.

The tools can find devices not performing at industry standards, for example, or identify low-performing FA ports based on the physical configuration. They can also automatically discover replication standards and related issues.

ZENfra creates a variety of preset or customized reports to suit the needs of individual projects. Customized reports can be used to identify any anomalies based on industry best practice or customer standards.

The tools can create consolidated reports in an environment to validate infrastructure setup or support reclamation or performance balancing. They also provide essential data for migration planning and validation.

Migration Project Management

The information available from ZENfra analysis and reports provides an accurate picture of the current infrastructure and its interdependencies, strengths and weaknesses. That information can be used to create a migration action plan and design workbook.

The tool creates management tasks and takes care of notification and reporting to simplify project management. Based on the action plan, ZENfra generates custom automation scripts that help reduce time to completion.

Simplify Migration

Automation tools like ZENfra^Tcan simplify complex, time-consuming migration tasks. Clients have reported that ZENfra^T has reduced migration times by 30 to 40 percent, compared to traditional in-house methods, and cut costs by around 25 percent.

More information

If you would like to find out more about our migration services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.