Our client is a top-ten banking institution and one of the largest financial services companies in the US.
This data center transformation and migration project was executed in a phased approach spanning three years. The client’s critical business services continued as usual throughout migrations, and 100 percent were executed with zero downtime or disruptions to operations. Post data center migration results included:
Before Data Center Migration
Our client’s data center portfolio was a complex network of sites with thousands of servers, appliances, and applications supporting banking services across the US. It was also fast-approaching the $250 billion regulatory milestone that mandates strict government regulations for financial institutions in the US. With outdated legacy infrastructure, our client struggled to achieve the zero transaction loss required by strict federal banking regulations.
They were quickly approaching capacity with space, power, and network bandwidth. As a banking institution servicing hundreds of thousands of customers across the US twenty-four hours per day, our client’s business could not tolerate disruptions to operations.
The goal was to deliver a flexible, reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that could meet strict security requirements and business growth a decade from now. In a rapidly changing financial services market, it also required bold and flexible choices to ensure they remained competitive and in step with evolving market needs. The solution: build a new data center from the ground up.
After engaging with David-Kenneth Group, our client began a collaborative effort to develop a data center transformation and migration strategy. Executing a project of this size and scale, IT and business stakeholders needed to be on the same page to align business and technology goals. Every part of the business organization and IT operations came to the table to understand impact, concerns, and opportunities. Consistent communication was key for the leadership team, and stakeholders were kept informed throughout the program to mitigate concerns and encourage institutional buy-in.
The Migration Project
Our client needed an accurate view of all assets in their operating environment, but poor data quality limited their ability to make sound business decisions. We executed an exhaustive IT infrastructure discovery of all IT assets and dependencies in the client’s data centers. Supported by an updated CMDB, our client was able to make critical business and technology decisions affecting the project.
Rigorous evaluation of performance, ability to meet scale, total cost of ownership, and supportability informed technology selections. We created system designs hand-in-hand with the client and vendors to ensure future compatibility with their roadmap and operational stability.
Prior to migration, we transformed and modernized assets affecting over ten thousand servers and implemented a new storage solution. These efforts provided a firm foundation for business performance in the new environment. The data center migration itself required multiple data center migration methods, including physical to physical (P2P), virtual to virtual (V2V), physical to virtual (P2V), limited lift and shift migrations, and limited greenfield builds, along with a complex network of partner connections.
All production workloads and supporting compute infrastructure were successfully migrated, totaling 6,000 servers and 830 applications. Additionally, high-performance applications experienced no performance degradation during migrations; technology enhancements were made to achieve long-term service availability goals; and a new DMZ hardened their security model.
All production workloads were successfully migrated from the source data center to the new data center, increasing speed of IT service delivery to lines of business by 40 percent. Additionally, future IT capital costs were reduced 60 percent by standardizing compute and storage platforms, increasing utilization of virtualization technologies, and driving a rigorous, aggressive approach to investing in new technologies to displace legacy infrastructure.
In addition to cost savings and tangible improvements in service delivery, security, and compliance, our client also experienced significant intangible benefits. These included an integrated change-control process to maintain CMDB integrity, standardized architectural designs and approval processes, and a tightly coupled IT governance model to foster improved IT and business relationships. Finally, the project resulted in meeting key business and project objectives, including:
Data center facility capacity was at a premium before the start of the data center transformation and migration project. To make room for projected business growth, our team increased network bandwidth capacity by 400 percent. Additionally, we deployed a scalable storage model and doubled blade capacity, increasing CPUs (central processing units) from 7,800 to 18,000.
Our client’s anticipated growth required a data center that could meet increased regulatory requirements. We implemented a more scalable and resilient network design that could support the zero transaction loss mandated by federal guidelines. Additionally, our team designed a dual scalability storage model and freed up space at the source data center for a future data-bunker deployment.
Despite the size and scale of the project, our client achieved significant cost savings while remediating data center power infrastructure limitations in its source data center. They saved $650,000 in monthly costs by migrating to a state-of-the-art data center with sufficient power infrastructure to support anticipated growth across all platform requirements.
This data center migration project was executed in a phased approach spanning three years. The client’s critical business services continued as usual throughout migrations and were executed with zero downtime and zero operational disruptions.
IT infrastructure discovery proved critical to the success of the migration, providing the migration team with clean data and a 360-degree view of a large and complex operating environment.
An integrated client/partner team allowed for faster, more frequent migrations, while a converged operations and engineering team streamlined migrations and facilitated hand-off to operations at the conclusion of the project.
Our client has built a solid foundation for value-creating growth in the foreseeable future and is fully equipped to respond with bold, commanding choices in a rapidly changing industry.
