Challenge & Approach
What we did
Business Objective
Time sensitive technical exit, reduce costs, increase IT efficiency, enable ongoing digital transformation.
Technical Objective:
Infrastructure consolidation and virtualisation, scalable solution architecture and increase resiliency.
Services
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Consulting
- Engineering
Project
Typical of any virtualisation project, an assessment was undertaken to identify and categorise each workload in preparation of a specific plan to be formed around each. A small number of methods were identified in order to archive the key sub-objectives of decommission, virtualisation or lift-and-shift. Select workloads had an additional designation of rationalisation or immediate transformation, which were then prioritised for future projects.
A temporary virtual infrastructure was designed and implemented, local to the existing server workloads, for the sole purpose of accelerating virtualisation of all applicable workloads. This activity was critical given the timescales demanded of the project however also allowed flexibility of the ultimate migration method used, in order to relocate workloads to an awaiting greenfield virtual infrastructure (hosted in a dedicated datacentre).
Workloads were migrated in to the new virtual infrastructure on a pre-determined schedule, planned and agreed with each service owner to establish suitable outage windows and engineering requirements.
The result
Outcome
Physical separation facilitating a time sensitive technical exit. Virtualisation of physical workloads reducing reliance on out of support hardware, whilst now being underpinned by a highly resilient and available physical data centre.
Right sizing of workloads further to an assessment period identifying bottlenecks and configuration issues that are readily addressed given the flexibility of a virtual environment.
Enablement of further digital transformation with the plans, methods and frameworks used as a blueprint for future data centre consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation programmes.