I’ve been involved on the periphery of several RFP responses, Statements of Work etc. that relate in one way or another to government agencies and large corporates outsourcing their infrastructure hosting to a provider.  I’m not talking here about equipment co-location, but rather scenarios where the hosting provider owns the tin and truly delivers the Data Centre Infrastructure as a Service, including the storage.  No doubt this is a growing trend both here in NZ and globally.

Nowhere during my involvement, which as I said has not been in-depth, have I come across descriptions, or requirements for that matter, on the ‘exit approach’

So I’ve been sitting here pondering, when the relationship between the customer and provider comes to an end after say, 3, 5 or 10 years and the customer has 100, 200, 600 TeraBytes of data sitting on the equipment (a SAN one would expect) owned by the incumbent provider how on earth would they go about migrating this to the new infrastructure or archiving it off for later access.

Keen to hear people’s thoughts on this.