From Monday, April 29th through Wednesday, May 1st, TDS will be exhibiting in Booth #117 at AFCOM’s Data Center World conference in Las Vegas. Held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel Conference Center, Data Center World positions itself as the premier educational conference and Expo for data center and facilities management professionals. The event is unique in its field since it draws upon the knowledge and experience of the more than 3,500 AFCOM members to create an end-user driven program that focuses on providing real solutions for today’s data center and facilities managers.
In the booth, TDS will be highlighting our range of vendor-independent data center services including data center relocations and critical infrastructure assessment and master planning. The new features in TDS TransitionManagerTM (see the article below) will be on display. Several TDS Principals will be in the booth, so stop by to discuss your projects, and enter our show drawing.
In addition to the main conference program, attendees can register for a full-day ‘deep-dive’ into educational tutorials from industry-leading experts. These tutorials are taking place on Monday, April 29, 2013, 9:15am-2:30pm. TDS Principal Steve Gunderson will be speaking as part of “Tutorial 3: Colocation Strategies.
A recent release of TDS TransitionManager included significant new capability, including the ability to dynamically create a runbook formula, saving time and resources when planning your migration. In the past, creating a runbook was a painstaking process done within an ever changing static document and took weeks or even months to create. Today, TDS can create a runbook within a day and is able to see the latest information changing in real time.
TransitionManager’s Dependency Mapping capability (to the right), is a multi-stage process that begins with a complete inventory of assets involved in the migration, and culminates with the creation of “move groups” (virtual and physical) which are assigned to specific migration “move events.” The interdependencies between applications, servers (virtual and physical), storage servers, and network and other devices are complex and critical to post move performance and availability. When planning a data center migration it is essential to completely understand these interdependencies to minimize the risk of unplanned downtime and ensure project success.
There have been a number of attributes added to create additional checks in your migration project. Having “predecessor” and “successor” tasks ensures that steps cannot be taken too early or in the wrong order. Milestones and Gateways create a single task at a current point in a project that all tasks will funnel through, until that milestone or gateway has been checked by a project leader, no additional steps can be taken, further ensuring the projects safety.
For both physical and virtual migrations, project managers review workloads, recognize bottlenecks, and direct teams as needed without the delays inherent in manual processes. Simultaneously, senior management has a real-time view of the project’s progress through TransitionManager’s web-based executive dashboards.
Craig Macfarlane, TDS Co-founder and CTO, will be giving a “Tech Talk” in New York on Thursday, April 11th at Tech Target’s Modern Infrastructure Decisions. He will be discussing how to optamize infrastructure in a hybrid data center by balancing on-premises, co-location and cloud resources.
Earlier this month TDS welcomed Glen DiPalma as Principal, VP of Process and Program Management. Glen comes to TDS with 29 years of experience helping IT service organizations rise to a level of excellence. His knowledge and skill for delivering scalable and reliable IT services was established while managing teams within the financial, banking, manufacturing and medical device industries. Most recently as a consultant, Glen was responsible for leading large regional and international data center migration projects.
Prior to consulting work, Glen was Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, for a US regional bank and before that worked for several Fortune 500 companies such as IBM Global Services of New Zealand, Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments, managing technical operations teams to deliver strategic services for their organizations.
Glen has a B.S. in Industrial Management from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. When he is not working to provide project leadership to TDS customers, he can be found sailing in New England waters or kite boarding off the beaches of Cape Cod.