Managing Information Technology

624 Part IV • The Information Management System

When we were negotiating with vendors for USA

Group, we weren’t really a big player in the

market and had less latitude.... As part of Sallie

Mae, we were nearly able to write our own terms

and conditions. In some cases, we were working

with vendor reps in D.C., and they were able to

make better and faster deals and were more

flexible. We told them what we wanted, and they

delivered.

—Becky Robinson, Director of Systems

Management

Three different strategies were used for installing
computer equipment in the Indianapolis facility that had
been used in Reston. (Improvements to infrastructure com-
ponents—such as backup equipment and more secure fire-
walls—were also built into the migration plans.)

1.TheAsset Swapmethod was used for equipment in

Reston ready to be retired. New equipment was pur-

chased from the hardware vendor for the Indianapolis

facility. Once the applications on the old equipment

had been moved to (installed on) the new equipment

in Indianapolis, the old equipment in Reston was

traded in to the vendor.

2.ThePush/Pullstrategy was used for select equip-

ment in Reston that was not ready to be retired and

difficult to replace: the old equipment was taken out,

moved, and reinstalled in Indianapolis.

3.TheSwingmethod was used for equipment that

existed in multiples. New equipment was purchased

for Indianapolis for the earliest moves. After the ini-

tial applications were successfully installed on the

new equipment, the relevant piece of equipment was

removed from Reston and shipped to Indianapolis

for the next move, and so on.

The strategy choice for each move element was
based on allowable downtime for the application(s)
involved, vendor prices for replacement equipment and
trade-ins, and physical move costs. The overall objective
was to decrease integration risks by minimizing the hard-
ware assets that would be physically moved from Reston
to Indianapolis. For example, a Reston data warehouse
was stored on a Sun E10K server. Since this was a very
expensive piece of equipment, an asset swap strategy
would have been very costly. However, it was learned that
the business could tolerate up to a week of downtime out-
side of the peak processing season, so a push/pull strategy
was used instead. The vendor tore down the machine in
Reston, trucked it to Indiana, and rebuilt it at the
Indianapolis facility.

Lack of backup was the biggest risk. We determined

the maximum downtime that the operation could

handle without losing customers, and we established

backup and system redundancies as needed.

—John Bennett, Project Manager for Data Center

Relocation

In contrast, the company couldn’t afford much

downtime for the mainframe on which the Class loan-

servicing system was run: the service centers needed to be

able to communicate with customers. The push/pull

method required too much downtime, so the asset swap

method was used. For DASD storage, a new vendor was

selected in order to provide newer technology that would

better handle the company’s increased storage needs, as

well as reduce the maintenance risks associated with older

technologies.

Redundancies were built in, wherever possible, to

minimize the business impact of the “go live” dates of crit-

ical applications. For example, beginning in March 2001,

three T1 lines were leased from AT&T in order to have a

fast electronic backup for the major moves.

We spent a lot of money, almost a million dollars in

two months, to create a pretty significant pipe between

the two centers, in order to have a very fast link, so that

you could essentially run the business out of either

center if your migration had a problem. Fortunately,

most of our migrations went well, and they did not

have any problems, but that was a great big insurance.

—Hamed Omar, Senior Vice President, Technology

Group

Prior to any move, the sending technology owners

worked with the target (receiving) technology owners to

transfer the knowledge needed by the Indianapolis opera-

tions staff to handle the changes in applications, hardware,

and large increases in transaction volume.

Early in the process, we asked teams to start plan-

ning and scheduling tasks related to training. The

approach was tell them, show them, watch them.

—Allan Horn, Vice President, Technology

Operations

The Major Data Center Moves

The DCR team began moving applications in February

2001, as they were ready (see Exhibit 10). From the

director level down, the IT staffs at Reston and Indianapolis