Moving Infrastructure is Easy. Moving Applications is Hard.

by Tim Schutt, VP, Client Solutions.

You want to move some servers from your data center to the cloud. Piece of cake, right?  There are tools for that.  As a matter of fact, there are a lot of tools for that – native tools, purpose-built tools, you name it.

So, you pick some virtual servers, and, using VMotion, you move those to your favorite cloud of choice by hitting the “Easy Button.”

But then the calls start coming in to the Help Desk from the accounting department complaining that the payroll application isn’t working, and they’re unable to generate pay checks.

What happened?  Your IT group scrambles around and confirms that the servers that were just moved are NOT the payroll servers.

So, what’s the problem?

You moved servers that support the HR application and contains information about all of your employees, so why can’t payroll be run?

Simple. The payroll application needs the HR application to be running in order for it to function.  By moving the HR application servers, you broke the dependency by moving the applications away from each other.

How could this have been avoided?

By understanding not only what that infrastructure supports, but more importantly, if the HR application is taken down, knowing which other critical business function will be affected.

It’s the knowledge of those application interdependencies that many organizations don’t have documented, or not in a place that is readily available to the IT group as they make their decisions to move infrastructure.

It’s critical to make sure you have a vision of your applications and their dependencies. And that you can understand your application-to-application and application-to-services dependencies as well as your application-to-infrastructure. So, would a tool that contains all of that data be useful?  Something that showed you everything you needed to know before making a decision that may come back to haunt you?

Our TransitionManager software contains all of that information and then ensures you can plan, orchestrate and execute cloud migrations without the risk of unplanned outage.  It has helped organizations migrate over one million virtual and physical servers for the past decade and resulted in no unexpected downtime for any of our customers’ business applications.

Isn’t that what it’s all about – your applications?  You can’t have an application without infrastructure, so why rip it out from under the application it supports without fully understanding the ramifications of doing so.

Moving infrastructure is easy.  Moving applications is hard. But you better know how they are connected before you make the decision to move either.

See How TransitionManager provides an accurate view of applications and interdependencies across hybrid IT environments: