Strategic Migration to AWS for Agility and Cost Savings
The client, a multinational energy giant, faced the challenge of aging data centers and costly VMware licenses. The challenge was to migrate 2,600 on-prem servers to AWS to drive cost savings and business agility while ensuring zero disruption.
Business requirements
Strategic Drivers:
- Aging data center equipment created a pivot point for transformation
- Time-bound exit planned from two data centers in Texas
- Included in ITOPS objectives to transform the IT workplace
Cloud and infrastructure goals:
- Accelerate the pace of cloud adoption
- Reduce on-prem infrastructure footprint
- Eliminate costly VMware licensing
Business goals:
- Enable business agility
- Achieve total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction
- Drive innovation through automation and the right tools
- Seek output-based commercial models with skin in the game
Financial and Operational Requirement:
- Unlock opportunities for cost savings
The challenge
- Significant data quality issues observed on DBM + CMDB, time lost to cleanse and refresh correct data
- The operations team’s heavy dependency on the production server's cutover and validation, pre and post-cutover activities
- Dependency on managed AWS for troubleshooting technical issues: MGN agent installation failures and boot-up test failures
- Dependency on application support teams for the assessment and downtime approvals
The objective
- Rehost compute and storage from on-premises to AWS while maintaining the existing support model and connectivity. No change to application functionality. No disruption to business users
- Avoid VMware licensing
- Inject scalability while improving performance
- Capex to Opex conversion
Why HCLTech
- Strong credentials in cloud migration
- Extensive knowledge of the existing infrastructure (tribal knowledge for minimal risk migration)
- Differentiating positioning through an end-to-end scope supported by HCLTech
- Proven credentials to manage asset lifecycle projects
- Effective change management best practices implementation
- Experience of successful joint executions with AWS Professional Services
The solution
- 2600 servers migrated to AWS over planned sprints across 30 months
- Discovery and revalidation of inventory to reduce redundant and duplicate inventory up to 50%
- Automated rehosting using the cloud migration factory tool
- Application servers’ lifecycle and other factors were key drivers for move group planning
- POD-based execution, four migration pods in parallel to achieve a peak of 200 servers’ migration per month
- Support the customer in planning and timely readiness for each wave of migration, working jointly with AWS professional services
- Dedicated SWAT team of an incident manager and server ops SME to handle issues reported post migration
- Dedicated assessment SMEs to handle the application assessment and interview process (earlier it was managed by the client)
The impact
- Zero Major INC post migration to AWS Cloud
- 43% Reduction in User-raised Incidents
- 100% Service Availability. No outages reported
- 100% CMDB Data quality improvements
- Automated 8 Major tasks for Pre and post-migration
- 99% Backup and Security compliance improvements
- Up to $14M savings due to OnPrem footprint reduction and VMware License cost reduction
- FinOps best practices implementation for EC2 instance and EBS volume rightsizing ~100K of cost savings
