Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) provides 40% of California’s water supply to 19 million people while delivering 1.5 billion gallons of water daily in 6 counties. Metropolitan Water District maintains pipelines, tunnels, service connections, reservoirs, water treatment plants, and hydroelectric facilities, all critical services to their customers and constituents.

PLANNET has been supporting MWD with technology consulting for a number of years and is currently supporting the District with IT systems migration planning, technical architecture, and appropriate program management support in support of data center relocation plans. As program manager for the complex set of system migrations, PLANNET provides planning and oversight of facility specifications, equipment procurement and build-out, specific systems migration methodology, advisement on testing procedures, and oversight of all pre-migration activities and systems migration execution.

PLANNET first worked with MWD to prepare a strategy for in-place data center improvements or relocation based on geographic risk considerations. Distributed compute capabilities in support of robust multi-site operations and recovery capabilities, along with certain cloud computing functions, were all part of the outcome architecture. PLANNET worked with MWD management to devise an achievable strategy for diverse compute capabilities and secure facilities along with all financial and risk management considerations for the various options considered and adopted.

PLANNET’s Program Management structure for the project runs as a compatible adjunct to the MWD PMO with the Program Manager for the DC Migration project along with key Infrastructure and Application Migration project managers, Technology Architect, and subject matter experts to accomplish the included and related IT initiatives that impact the data center project, such as major system upgrades, platform transformations, move to cloud and corresponding changes to security architecture.

The project began in 2019 and is expected to complete in 2022.