If you’re a partner looking to create or expand a migration service offering or a Managed Service Provider (MSP) trying to deliver an easy and reliable onboarding experience, server and data migrations often present challenges that defy predictability.

Biggest obstacle: Identifying a reliable product that addresses all the data migration technical concerns.

Once you’ve identified the solution that provides the best technology, the next most important criteria is scalability.

Whether the solution is scalable can have a significant business impact for all service providers.

Important scalability questions you should ask about any migration solution:

– Will the solution be able to cover the different production server configurations that you see at customer sites?

– Without hitting performance limitations, will the solution be able to handle varying quantities of server workloads found in your customers’ data centres?

– Does the solution complement your migration business model in such a way that it lets you take on new business regardless of the type or size of the migrations involved?

– Does the solution scale to handle changes in scope after the project has already started – increases or decreases in server count, applications included or excluded and schedule changes?

Creating highly scalable systems

A good place to start is to consider the server workload types covered by a migration solution.

Questions you should be asking about workload coverage:

– Does the migration solution scale out to cover the maximum workload types available or is it hyper-focused on one use case or workload type?

– Is the solution providing a technology which is so generic that it lacks features or customisations that are needed to successfully migrate certain workloads?

– Does the solution provide a seamless management experience regardless of overall server workload composition?

The next scalability component relates to how well the technology scales up or down depending on the total amount of servers that need to be migrated.

If the solution infrastructure overhead is significant, you prevent pursuing some customers altogether to reduce profitability impact.

Here are some questions to ask about migration scalability as it relates to opportunities:

– Does the scale up and scale down cover any migration project?

– Does the solution require infrastructure components: specialised hardware appliances, dedicated networking, intermediate storage for staging images, etc. – that might prevent you from pursuing opportunities because of the overhead involved?

– Regardless of the number of server workloads being migrated, does the solution’s management complexity hold steady?

Licenses should scale too

The last scalability component to consider relates to licensing and consumption models.

Consumption models can impact scalability in two important ways.

1. Whether the consumption model enables a migration service provider to pursue the maximum amount of business with a minimum upfront investment.

2. License term: whether it aligns with the amount of time needed for migration project completion.

Questions to consider when looking at consumption models:

– How is the migration solution licensed? Does the solution provide perpetual licensing? Subscription licensing? Both?

– Does the consumption model facilitate or limit the pursuit of new business with minimum investment?

– Does the consumption model allow you to scale migration projects for engagements that require additional time?

– Without impacting business, does the licensing model allow you to scale consumption up/down for projects that see a change in quantity after they have already been bid?

Selecting the right migration solution to both complement and enhance your business model can be challenging.

Knowing migration solutions can scale to cover server workload types gives you the confidence to pursue migration regardless of the complexity of customer environments.

Avoid scaling issues by bringing these questions to the table when shopping for a reliable migration solution.

Contact us at team@synnexcloud.com.au to learn more about a scalable migration solution for your business.

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