Mergers go smoother with a well-prepped data center

Computerworld - Last year broke records for the number of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and this year, IT managers have to step up and make sure their data centers can help bring those deals to life.

"A well-run data center with reduced complexity makes mergers and acquisitions much easier," says Andi Mann, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.

Last year, announced worldwide merger and acquisition (M&A) activity hit $3.8 trillion. This not only beat the previous record set in 2000 of $3.4 trillion, but it marked a 38% increase over 2005, according to Thomson Financial. Google Inc. snapped up YouTube Inc. for $8 billion, and there was the "merger of equals" between Mellon Financial and The Bank of New York for $16.5 billion.

According to FactSet Mergerstat LLC, more than 11,000 deals were done. As the dust clears, experts and IT managers agree that companies will feel the full effect of this M&A frenzy directly in their data centers. And experts advise organizations to prepare now or risk experiencing downtime if they have to merge mission-critical assets.

"Today, the most downtime companies can afford for critical data center infrastructure is measured in minutes." Merged and acquired infrastructure "has to be available right away," says Ryan Osborn, president of the Omaha chapter of AFCOM, a data center industry group.

Observers agree that the key to M&A success in the data center is to focus on virtualization, documentation and logistics.

Osborn, who has been through numerous acquisitions as IT infrastructure manager at a company he can't identify by name, says these three areas will help companies get ahead of the game and turn a time of crisis into one of opportunity. "You won't spend your time just moving infrastructure from one data center to another. You can actually do a technology refresh, get newer equipment and come out ahead," he says.

Infrastructure logistics

For John Musilli, data center operations manager at Intel Corp., the most critical piece is knowing about basic logistics.

"I don't always have to know what a server does, but I do have to know how to keep it alive," he says. "It's getting something moved from Point A to Point B, and it doesn't matter whether the logistics deal with putting servers on a truck or transferring data over a line."

Musilli has been through a handful of acquisitions in his eight years at Intel and says that he has it down to a science. "As part of the acquiring company, it's my job to provide the skeletal environment to accept any company's assets that come to us," he says.

As such, he keeps a healthy amount of generic racking, generic cabling, extra bandwidth on the network and generic power. "I go generic because I probably won't know what servers, how many slots or what type of power we'll need beforehand. With generic, I can configure whatever I need in minutes," Musilli says. For instance, he uses a universal busway for power so that he doesn't have to be concerned about the particular electrical needs of the acquired equipment.