Project Genesis—Data Center Relocation for a New Start

In late 2018 Information Technology Solutions (ITS) at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) started the planning needed to consolidate multiple data centers and to relocate all administrative workloads to a commercial colocation facility. This gave birth to “Project Genesis” and started a major organizational undertaking. Relocating applications and systems between multiple data centers is a massive undertaking and deciding to take on a project like this needs to be carefully considered. ITS is three-fourths through consolidating three data centers and completing the relocation of our administrative applications. We will discuss the planning and analysis processes, how and when to use external vendors, balancing decision-making related to what steps of the project to delegate to vendors and what steps to take on in-house, among other gotchas we encountered. We will start with a high-level overview of the project, provide the guiding strategy, discuss the implementation and the lessons learned, and what we would do differently if we had to do it over again. We will discuss managing the expectations of internal and external stakeholders. To round out the presentation we will talk about managing project risks, including managing extremely high-impact, low-probability risks. This is an undertaking with a lot of unknowns, and it was a first for the entire team. The speakers represent the primary project steering and management teams