Generating Project Plans for Data Center Transformations

Amrit Lal Ahuja and Girish Keshav Palshikar

Abstract. Operations of modern organizations critically depend on Data Centers (DC). Due to ad hoc additions from diverse business units over time, the IT resources in a DC get unwieldy and complex. Transformations of DC - server consolidation, migration, application/data simplification, technology standardization - are important for cost, efficiency and reliability. Even when a specific transformation is identified (“consolidate these 100 existing servers into these 48 new servers”) it is difficult to generate a detailed optimal project plan for its execution. The project plan must identify all the tasks involved, identify an optimal team (size and expertise) and generate a detailed work schedule that meets the and respects the constraints and dependencies among the tasks. We present a methodology to generate such a plan automatically from given ”high-level” IT transformation specifications (“as-is” and “to-be” states). We adopt a heuristic forward chaining metric temporal planner engine (SAPA) to generate a project plan that attempts to optimize the overall time and team-size. The idea is to capture the domain-knowledge as reusable planning action. This automation reduces the efforts and errors in manual project planning. The method can be extended to projects in other domains.

LNAI 7691, p. 767 ff.

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