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The idea of migrating to a new IT infrastructure platform produces anxiety for many IT teams, especially in companies with a substantial quantity of data to move. Platform migration can mean downtime for your systems, operational changes and technical risk—just to name a few of the common migration worries.

For complex IT projects like this, it’s advisable to work with experienced IT professionals who have a wealth of knowledge about not only the new platform but also the migration process and the execution of complex migrations.

Time for a technology refresh

My team recently worked on a project with a large IT services company in the Asia Pacific region that was looking to do a major technology refresh. The company was running older hardware from a competing vendor and confronting storage constraints as well as scalability challenges. It needed to update to a platform that could handle its growing workload and scale as needed. And of course, it wanted better performance, with the aim of ultimately producing a better user experience.

Changing platforms and migrating its Oracle database from little endian format to big endian format would require a major migration, and the company had some negative previous experiences with cross-platform migration.

Its IT team was asking good questions:

• How can we ensure a reasonable time frame to conduct the migration, with minimal downtime or disruption to our business?
• How can we prevent weeks of performance issues after the migration?

Putting migration worries at ease

After reviewing competing solutions, the client was convinced of the capabilities of IBM Power Systems. IBM provided a strong roadmap for moving to the IBM Power Systems platform, and the client gave IBM permission to run a proof of concept (POC). For high-risk projects like this one, a successful POC helps ease migration worries and provides evidence of the benefits of the new platform.

IBM Systems Lab Services was engaged to conduct the POC.

Lab Services has an experienced team of migration consultants with proven expertise to help clients design, build and deliver successful migrations to IBM platforms. We help clients reduce the costs and risks of migration with proven processes, specialized tools and many years of migration experience. We also help clients migrate faster between generations of IBM Power Systems servers with enterprise-scale provisioning and live migration automation tools.

Our POC for the IT services company demonstrated a seamless migration process that met and exceeded its performance expectations and could be completed in the target time window.

Migration in action

After several mock runs, Lab Services carried out the migration of four databases of Oracle E-Business Suite amounting to almost 150 TB of data.

The client’s old infrastructure (source servers) had some performance limitations, and the migration needed to be completed within 48 hours. The file system format on the existing system and the new system were different, so storage-based migration (using faster host bus adapter [HBA] cards) was not feasible, and the only option was using a local area network (LAN).

We used storage virtualization to copy data from the client’s old storage system to temporary storage before downtime started and without any impact to the performance of the source systems. This enabled us to copy data without any performance penalty to servers.

Once downtime started, these volumes were mounted on an interim IBM Power Systems server with higher processing and memory configuration, and high-speed network cards (called a swing server). We then copied data to the target system, thereby eliminating the bottleneck of the slow source system.

In order to achieve the organization’s requested performance levels within the targeted migration window, we realized we needed to reorganize the file system. Lab Services Power Systems and Storage and SDI consultants came together to formulate and automate the migration process from swing server infrastructure to the new infrastructure and aligned it with the new file system structure for optimized performance.

Ultimately, Lab Services mitigated the challenges of this complex project with a fully successful migration, and the client immediately saw performance improvements over its previous setup.

Other benefits include:

• A reduction in licensing costs
• Faster transaction processing
• Better system availability for business continuity
• Best of all—user satisfaction

What put the client’s initial migration worries at ease? Well, a proof of concept, mock runs, rigorous testing and automation, troubleshooting and performance optimization all contributed to a great final outcome. Most of all, working with a team of experienced IT professionals gave the client the confidence it needed to progress on its IT journey with its new IBM Power Systems platform.

Please contact IBM Systems Lab Services if we can assist with your next IT project.

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