ICL Services was approached by one of the top 100 largest banks in Russia in 2017. It was making plans to move the IT infrastructure from the head office to a commercial data processing centre to free up space and optimise the costs of cooling, electricity and communication channels. It was important to transfer the infrastructure without any loss of performance, in an uninterrupted mode.
Initially, the client could not decide on the scheme of further ownership of IT infrastructure. ICL Services proposed transferring the entire IT infrastructure to the commercial data center and used calculations to demonstrate the profitability of such. Eventually, the client freed up the head office and optimised costs.
Key Challenges
- Transfer of IT infrastructure from the head office to the commercial data processing centre
- Optimisation of costs for cooling, electricity and communication channels
- Carrying out of the project without loss of performance, in an uninterrupted mode
Implemented our solution
The whole process of transferring the data processing centre was divided into several stages:
- taking inventory and updating the transfer lists;
- analysis of clusters, removal of redundant instances, file storage archiving;
- transfer of equipment and migration of virtual machines to the new data processing centre;
- transfer of telephony and VPN services to the new data processing centre, network rebuilding, transfer of the head office to the mode of supplementary office.
- To relocate the bank’s infrastructure without affecting its performance, the specialists of ICL Services freed up capacity. Physical servers were transferred to a commercial data processing centre and a private cloud was deployed there. First, a replica of critical information systems was restored on the deleted side, and the rest was transferred later. The connection between the locations was organised via a data transfer channel, by running the system in remote office mode.
In the course of the project, the infrastructure grew and the amount of information increased. Some initial decisions turned out to be ineffective. We had to revise them on-the-go and set new deadlines. There were some difficulties with network equipment from the point of view of fault tolerance and with custom applications, but most of them were planned.
Project parameters:
- 15 information systems and applications;
- 53 physical and 622 virtual servers;
- 895 configuration units;
- total amount of data — 620 TB;
- Cisco Catalyst and Nexus network equipment.
Migration was provided by 12 engineers and 4 architects of the Virtualization, Storage& Backup, Network, Wintel, Unix, DBA and Monitoring areas.
- We interacted with the client on a weekly basis, even more often during the active stage of the project. The results achieved and plans for the next week were discussed at the meetings. Contact points included both managers and server and network specialists.
Products and technologies
- Consulting and Optimisation of Data Processing Centres
Results
- As a result, the entire complex and large-scale infrastructure, all information systems of the bank were transferred to a commercial data processing centre and operate remotely.
- The client lowered the ownership cost of the IT infrastructure and reduced the costs of cooling and electricity.
- The head office was vacated.
- The migration itself took place without any downtime in the main operations of the client.