Leading end-to-end environment expansions and migrations
Read the full case study here: Cloud Modernization & Migration
Introduction
A major technology company wanted to consolidate its cloud footprint and modernize its capabilities. The consolidation required the design and build out of new VMware environments to house existing applications with capacity for future growth, manage application migrations to modern private and public cloud environments, and decommissioning or repurposing devices in the legacy data center. Our client pursued developing a private cloud with public-like capabilities for a materially lower total cost of ownership. They were also continuing to build out solutions in public cloud for diversification. DayBlink Consulting supported the consolidation and migration planning, modernization design facilitation and overall execution.
Problem
Our client needed to quickly migrate applications and workloads to free up and decommission a large, regional data center facility
The cloud migration faced many challenges from both an application and infrastructure perspective. There was no reliable source of truth for applications, owners, requirements or interdependencies. Applications and services lacked clearly identified destinations due to infrastructure availability, security limitations and budget. The team had no solutions architect with institutional and cloud knowledge to designate clear migration plans. There was no source of truth inventory of existing hardware (compute, network, security and storage) in the legacy data center. There was no clear plan on how existing hardware would be handled. Some hardware in the legacy data center was outdated and did not meet modern data center requirements. There was not sufficiently available modernized private cloud infrastructure to absorb the legacy data center footprint. Finally budget constraints limited the team’s ability to entirely procure and deploy a modernized replacement environment.
Solution
We inventoried application requirements, interdependencies, available capacity and infrastructure to design a staged plan
DayBlink Consulting helped identify and document the current application and infrastructure footprints in the legacy data center, manage the end-to-end buildout of multiple private cloud expansions using new and re-usable infrastructure, and migrate interdependent applications and services to public and private cloud platforms.
We then developed a source of truth application and infrastructure inventory and assessed many factors (e.g., security constraints, geographic requirements, growth plans, current private cloud capacity availability, etc.) to determine target private and public cloud destinations for every app.
For the apps targeting AWS migrations, we worked with teams to tailor their migration strategies, which primarily involved re-factoring, re-platforming or re-hosting. The migration strategy depended on migration complexity, available budget, application criticality and the overall technology roadmap.
For the private cloud migrations, we designed VMware environments based on app requirements, app growth projections, and private cloud modernization goals. We developed and executed an equipment sourcing plan within budget by re-using existing on-hand equipment across national and regional footprints and sourcing new equipment from strategic vendors.
We then created a beachhead to initiate the migration out of the legacy data center. We deployed critical infrastructure and foundational services to enable future downstream application migrations. We successfully managed application migrations to the new private cloud environments and public clouds by sequencing migrations based on application interdependencies. The most core applications migrated first, while applications with minimal downstream dependencies migrated later.
Finally, we repurposed reusable equipment that was freed up after applications were migrated and we decommissioned the remaining end-of-life and obsolete equipment. We systematically shut off the source environment and monitored for impacts.
Outcome
Our client migrated to multiple clouds while minimizing business interruptions and improving operational efficiencies
The team successfully migrated hundreds of interdependent applications and thousands of pieces of network, security, compute and storage hardware to turn down the legacy data center without interrupting uptime, minimizing any impact to customers. The equipment sourcing strategy avoided spending several million dollars through re-using existing hardware in the legacy environment alongside procuring new equipment.
Overall, we realized significant operating expense savings through the consolidation and modernization effort. The client was on track to save tens of millions of dollars through more application refactoring and modernization which improved capacity and workload spend forecasting and management, lower operations and maintenance costs, cost savings from data center consolidation, and spend optimization through improved infrastructure sourcing strategy.