The Client

This publicly listed manufacturer of industrial & commercial products designs, manufactures, sells and services industrial and commercial products. The company’s climate and industrial segments offer a myriad of market-leading products related to heating, cooling and refrigeration that span a variety of industrial and consumer sectors.

Database Migration Challenges

With a wide variety of databases in use - from Oracle and SQL to SQL Anywhere, the company needed to find a solution which would seamlessly migrate to the cloud without disrupting the daily business operations or jeopardise the security or stability of the data during transfer.

Internal Assessment

As a first step in its cloud migration journey, the manufacturer performed an internal assessment of security, operations, infrastructure, projects in-flight, operational costs, architecture, business agility, vendors and scalability. Based on the findings, it was clear that in order to meet business and market demands the company had to leverage new technologies to improve agility, productivity, quality of service and innovation. If done successfully, the use of these new technologies would help to capitalize on new business opportunities whilst lowering operational costs.

To accomplish these goals, the company created a Cloud Migration Computing Core Team to evaluate and adopt a cloud provider. It also agreed to build all new applications in the cloud as part of its “Cloud First” strategy, which would aim to move the company’s applications to the cloud using a multi-step approach.

Phase 1: Data Center Moves

The first phase of the project involved the migration of the company’s non-production and production workloads out of two of its data centers located in the US into AWS. RiverMeadow’s SaaS cloud migration solutions was selected to carry out these migrations. Out of the 500 virtual machines (VMs) that were scheduled for migration, the first phase of 280 migrations has now been successfully completed to date with more soon to follow.

Operating Systems, Databases & Applications

In terms of operating systems, more than 50% of the workloads were running on Windows (2003/2008/2012 server versions) with everything else running on Linux (RHEL) and Oracle Enterprise License.  There were also a great variety of databases in use including Oracle, SQL and SQL Anywhere. The applications to be migrated consisted of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) applications to be used as-is, as well as customized, including:

• Tableau
• Oracle Peoplesoft CRM
• Web Applications
• SAP
• File Servers
• MS Sharepoint
• Vertex Tax System
• Citrix
• Adobe
• Cisco
• Product Life-cycle Management Software

Results

Given the business-critical nature of this project it was vital that everything ran smoothly without any disruption to day-to-day operations. In spite of the highly complex nature of the project, RiverMeadow’s SaaS Cloud Migration Platform is well set up to migrate a wide variety of operating systems and databases. It is a testament to the agility and power of the solution that the project went to plan, bringing significant benefits to the entire business - from Finance, Operations and Logistics to IT Services, Sales and Marketing.