Relocation and migration of critical infrastructure for the Bureau of Meteorology

The Bureau of Meteorology had two data centres, DC1 and DC2, with a third, hosted facility being prepared, DC3.

The primary ICT processing systems and data storage were housed in DC1. An ageing, legacy data centre, the lease for DC1 was due for renewal.

Faced with an impending lease expiry, the Bureau of Meteorology developed a business case which recommended vacating DC1. The underlying building services infrastructure was approaching end-of-life, in a facility which presented design constraints, support overheads and high operations costs. And the risks associated with upgrading the facility were deemed greater than those to relocate to a purpose-built hosted data centre.

All ICT applications, systems and services were to be consolidated and relocated to DC2 while the Bureau of Meteorology built and commissioned the foundation ICT – LAN, firewalls, compute and storage – within DC3.

ICT services capability and extensive experience with data centre projects saw Frame win the competitive tender and be awarded the contract to develop the relocation strategy and migration plan, then provide technical leadership and management of the relocation and migration.

Frame assisted the Bureau of Meteorology to fully relocate its ICT applications, systems and services, without disruption to business operations, vacating the ageing DC1 within the agreed timeframe. This also put in place the foundations for the Bureau of Meteorology to introduce enhanced disaster recovery capabilities.

Key to the success of the relocation was an extensive audit and analysis of the DC1 ICT environment, at the start, followed by development of the relocation strategy and detailed migration plan.

For the audit, Frame mapped all applications, systems and services to the physical infrastructure. As well as being used to account for everything following migration, the audit has given the Bureau of Meteorology up-to-date asset and configuration information of its systems, providing the foundation for a configuration management database. While the information may have existed, in some form, within various systems throughout the Bureau of Meteorology, this was the first time it’s been aggregated.

This information fed into the migration plan, which addressed each of the business-critical systems and services, and clearly identified their applications, database and infrastructure dependencies. Then Frame engaged with the Bureau of Meteorology’s business, technical and operations stakeholders to promote the plan, and refine it to ensure a seamless migration.

With DC3 under construction, the lease for DC1 due to expire, and stringent timeframes to realise the business case objectives, Frame recommended a staged migration strategy. First, DC1 hosts were relocated into the secondary hosted data centre, DC2; while the Bureau of Meteorology’s primary storage and tape storage were replicated and relocated to DC3. The next stage, yet to be undertaken, is to logically rebalance the virtual machines into DC3 using the same procedures and processes that Frame developed.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s General Manager, Solution Delivery & Support, had this to say:

The Frame Group was a trusted partner which helped us achieve a resounding success in our data centre relocation project at the Bureau of Meteorology. Their expertise in the planning and design phase of the project was pivotal and their advice, approach and attitude during the execution of the migration was precise, supportive and accountable.

The DC1 ICT migration project was complex and multi-faceted. It encompassed technical expertise, migration planning and project execution, as well as resource management of the Bureau of Meteorology’s staff and 22 specialist third parties, comprising vendors and subcontractors.

The relocation planning and execution was 9 months of effort, completed over an 11-month period, covering 149 production systems, 82 development and test systems, 353 production virtual machines, and 144 development and test virtual machines.

Most of the application and data migrations were performed via a logical migration process. The critical business systems were relocated using a sequenced combination of physical and logical migrations to maintain operations with minimum downtime.

Phase 1 covered the ICT audit of DC1 and migration planning, which comprised:

• physically auditing DC1’s ICT environment.
• reviewing and assessing applications, ICT infrastructure, service level agreements, disaster recovery plans, and the change process.
• identifying service dependencies.
• developing the strategic migration plan and the migration plan to vacate DC1.

Phase 2 covered preparation of the relocation, the physical moves to DC2 and DC3, the staged migration of services to DC2 and DC3, and decommissioning of DC1, which comprised:

• technical leadership.
• stakeholder engagement and consultation.
• detailed planning of the migration sequence for applications, systems and services.
• risk assessment.
• relocation planning and documentation.
• change management, including preparation for and presentation to the Change Advisory Board.
• spatial planning and ICT capacity planning for DC2 and DC3.
• resource management.
• execution management.
• test co-ordination and management for critical infrastructure systems.
• physical asset recovery and relocations.
• asset database management.
• ICT infrastructure removal, and dismantling of passive infrastructure.