Migration and relocation: the exit is the easy half
In a migration, the exit is the easy half. What makes it hard is everything that has to be already running on the other side.
Dependencies, not transport
Moves rarely fail because a truck was late. They fail because something in the old room was still serving something in the new one, DNS, a licence server, an authentication path, a monitoring collector, a backup target.
The dependency map is therefore the first deliverable, and it is built from observed traffic rather than from documentation.
Sequencing
- Establish connectivity between sites and verify it under load, not at idle.
- Move the services other things depend on first, and prove them.
- Move in waves grouped by dependency, not by rack position.
- Keep a rollback path for each wave, with a decision point and a deadline.
- Decommission only after a defined soak period, never on the same day.
That last point is where migration and decommissioning meet, and where pressure to close the old site early causes the most damage.
Scope the migration
Describe both sites and the target window. Providers can then tell you which parts are genuinely parallelizable.
Data Center Exit decommissions data halls: asset inventory, de-cabling, rack removal, on-site or witnessed data destruction, resale and recycling, and the certificate trail that proves each of them happened.