For IT departments, computing systems obtained from merger partners or acquired companies have power to induce massive business risk when they need migrating to the unaccustomed IT infrastructure or consolidating on to existing platforms.

Computing asked Peter Mehta, principal person executive of datacentre consolidation firm SANpulse, what his top tips are against a CIO when dealing with a company merger.

Mehta offered the following:

The first thing to do is to bring in a firm to application automation to discover your environment.

That doesn’t just mean discovery discrete IT components, but the entire infrastructure – that means servers, the switch layer, and the storage layer. Then you need to audit which applications are tied in to those servers.

Check the notice discovered, and make sure you know what you want to conclude with it. If the acquisition or merger proceeds, ask what am I getting – single business units, or the entire IT estate?

Understanding your allow IT infrastructure will enable you to figure out the best manner of assimilating what IT you’re inheriting. For example, am I migrating 10 petabytes (PB) [of facts], 2 petabytes, or just 1 terabyte, and where are we impelling it to?

How many servers am I migrating? What’s the bring to the ~ space and power requirement?

Would it be better to do a right ‘lift and shift’, or do I go back to the attracting board and get my vendors in here, and actually refresh the assets? That way I won’t have to worry for the nearest four years, because I’ll have a consistent set of ICT estate.

The main reason for an acquisition is usually cost savings. If you’re going to be the subject of IT cost savings, there had better be some IT overlap that you be possible to leverage.

If I have a [server] frame that currently is barely 20 per cent utilised, can I take those acquired assets and application the frame that I already have? Similarly, with virtualisation software, you poverty to look at whether you’re a VMware shop or a Windows store. You’ve got your [virtualisation] farms already built, so there should have ~ing synergies there.

Overlap doesn’t just mean with physical IT systems, however operationally, because you don’t need that many people to horsemanship the new assets.

Check your storage utilisation rates. Typical storage utilisation rates today are 20–25 for cent of the actual physical storage, and I’ve rarely seen it upper 30 per cent.

I have a customer who has 12PB of storage. When they did some actual utilisation analysis, only 3PB was being used. But guess that which? They’re buying new storage plus frames, based on a progress rate tied to 12PB.

If I base my data growth without interrupti~ a 20 per cent per year rate, I’d subsist adding 2.4PB per year, when I should be adding it based without interrupti~ 3PB – that’s 600TB – four times less.

Remember your storage vender won’t be pushing you towards the less expensive route. Their self-~ is in selling you the maximum amount of storage.

Most storage vendors slip on’t do heterogeneous storage discovery for their own benefit. They slip on’t want to focus on optimising any competing storage assets, they paucity to sell you more disks.