Multi-Data Center Migration
CLIENT:
Major Automotive Remarketer
BACKGROUND:
This major automotive remarketer had acquired multiple business units, each with several on-premise data centers. A 5-year program was established to consolidate several data centers into east and west primary and disaster recovery data centers. One business unit, which managed dealer websites, has a production data center located in Los Angeles and a disaster recovery data center in Washington, DC. These two data centers needed migrated to the east / west data centers located in Atlanta and Las Vegas respectively.
CHALLENGES:
The client’s disaster recovery data center did not contain a reliable backup of critical data and the probability of a successful DR event recovery was low. Additionally, the production data center contained outdated network, storage, and virtualization technologies which inhibited Mean Time-To -Recovery (MTTR) during outages and/or performance degradations.
WHAT I DID:
Program Managed the data center migrations of the client’s Los Angeles and Washington, DC to the east and west primary/DR data center locations. Over a 15-month time period, a core team of network, storage, virtualization, and security staff members successfully sized, configured, and tested capacity in each of the on-premise data centers to accommodate the migrations.
Key to the approach was the ability to use Cisco’s Migration Pod and ACI technology to allow cross-data center workloads to operate during migration with minimal latency. This prevented the need to use a “Big Bang” approach which helped minimized outage risk.
RESULTS:
- Successfully decommissioned the Washington, DC DR site by simultaneously operating the Los Angeles and Las Vegas data center locations as dual failback sites during migration activities
- Over an 8-week window, successfully migrated the following infrastructure components:
- 1000+ virtual machines (VMs) onto Dell 768 blades
- 50+ Terabytes of data onto NetApp storage
- 300+ applications
- All aspects of networking – Internet advertisement, internal L2/L3 routing, firewall deployments
- Executive management was extremely pleased with the limited degradations that occurred during migration and the $2.0M annualized savings of data costs due to the consolidations
- Additionally, infrastructure Recovery Time Objective (RTO) was reduced from days to ~4 hours
