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Migration Without Mishap (continued)

Experts recommend the following strategies to increase your chances of completing a successful migration:

Let the application drive the migration According to Gill, this is the number-one rule when planning a migration. "Because the application drives the decision as to what hardware and software platform choices you have, in many ways the decision is beyond the scope of things in your control," he says. Adds Gould, "because these computers have become commoditized, people care less and less about the operating system or underlying hardware -- what matters is the applications you use, or plan to use. Are those applications supported on a given hardware or software platform? That's the key question."

Seize the opportunity to embrace virtualization, clustering and other high-availability solutions A server migration isn't just about continuing to do what you've always done; you can also use it to implement other, more advanced data center capabilities. For example, virtualization is the ability to share storage and processing capabilities regardless of the physical source of a resource; clustering is when multiple machines work together so that they can be viewed as a single computer. In either case, both techniques enable enterprises to gain access to more, and more powerful server capabilities than they would if just performing a straight migration from one server to another.

Bring IT workers quickly up to speed on the new technologies The skill set of employees is another critical consideration when migrating servers. Many of the existing environments are Unix-based. For obvious reasons -- since Linux is a flavor of Unix -- it's easier to transition IT workers to Linux rather than Windows. "But although the learning curve is a lot less steep, the ease of use and manageability of Windows Server means that salaries for Windows administrators are less," says Gould. "These are tradeoffs that companies have to make." (article continues)

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