ABOUT THE PROJECT:

Our client is a national distributor with office, warehouse and retail operations located nationally and in NZ and South Africa.

Our client’s primary on-premise infrastructure was approaching end of life, offering the opportunity to refresh with a new solution tailored to our client’s rapid growth strategy and their robust suite of warehousing and e-commerce tools. The VMWare cluster supported 100+ virtual machine workloads and supported over 500 end users and various web-facing applications.

Cisco’s Hyperconverged solution was chosen as the preferred baseline, leveraging cloud-hosted management to downsize on-premises footprint. Hyperconvergence allowed our client to minimise initial cost while tying future expansion opportunities to a repeatable, predictable template and cost. Veeam Backup & Replication was configured with several improvements including a partially air-gapped hardened repository, and replica virtual machines running on the end-of-support hardware offsite.

PROJECT SUMMARY:

PROJECT NAME: Datacentre relocation
DATE: March – April 2023

TECHNOLOGIES
HARDWARE – Cisco rack servers. Cisco Switches and Firewalls
SOFTWARE – Cisco, VMWare and Veeam

EXECUTION
• Server Infrastructure and core networking relocated to private racks in a tier 3 datacenter.
• Disaster Recovery redesigned to harden against modern threat landscape.
• Core networking rebuilt in preparation for a SD-WAN implementation.

Best-practice recommendations from major vendors were used to craft a minimal-impact migration to new services. All systems were configured with automatic failover and hardware redundancy, protecting against several key points of failure simultaneously. To minimise downtime and circumvent replication bandwidth limitations, the production storage array was relocated to the new datacentre, and storage presented over iSCSI to tie into the new Hyperconverged solution seamlessly.

RESULT:

The modernization project successfully improved performance while achieving high levels of business continuity. Although the project design was complex, involving significant downtime, the success of the project was driven by a robust communication strategy that effectively managed end-user expectations.