The world’s most admired company that produces alcoholic beverages sought a partner to provide Data centre consolidation and migration as part of their regional IT expansion project.
Challenge
This customer recognized early on that they were going to need help with this initiative. Although they had some expertise in all of the technical areas, they did not have any staff with experience in a large-scale consolidation and migration projects from a technical, business or project management standpoint. With a need for minimal down time due to the availability requirements for their critical business users, they quickly realized that they would have a great deal of risk trying to internalize this type of project.
With this type of project, the client wanted to leverage the skilled partner they brought in to deploy new technologies and seamless migration.
Solution Offered
Consolidating and migrating equipment from two separate data centres can be very tricky, and this project was no exception. Our technical staff first went to work to identify everything installed in the data centers , their owners, configurations, connections and purpose. Since these data centers were not static and did not have strict change control, proper labelling, there were constant add, moves and changes within the data centers. To combat this constant movement, an asset database was created for tracking each asset, its location, connections, and dependencies.
All of the data centers were interconnected, with dependencies between servers, storage, applications, network components, people and processes. Our team developed a complete network diagram and reviewed all network configurations, proper physical movement, patching and cabling plan. The result was a solid understanding of all installed assets and intersystem dependencies. The customer was not aware of almost 20% of the assets they had deployed which was no longer in use.
The resulting new data center systems have allowed this customer to reduce their energy consumption by reducing the number of servers through virtualization, upgrading assets to newer more energy efficient solutions.
Technology Stack
HPE, Meraki, Cisco, CheckPoint, FortiGate and VMWare