The Customer

Citi is a leading global bank that has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions.

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The Requirement

One of the customer storage arrays had suffered an unknown outage causing impact to many critical Production systems. The loss of confidence suffered through the unidentifiable root cause meant this array and its replication partner were identified for urgent decommissioning..

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The Solution

The solution provided the technical and project management resources to define the migration procedures, to perform the data migrations and to track and report on overall progress on a regular basis. The migrations were to be predominantly array-based, using a mix of EMC Open Replicator software and Hitachi virtualisation, although host-based methods would be used where this suited the business needs.

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The Delivery

A project planning phase was initiated to gather detailed information for each individual system from a variety of sources including array management software and Citi's in-house billing systems. The collected information was then used to create individual migration passports for each system. A number of migration procedures were created to cater for a variety of storage and server configurations including replicated, and non-replicated storage and clustered servers. The procedures were incorporated with standard working practices to form detailed runbook documents for each configuration.

 

Working closely with the UK based Storage BAU Team and Systems Administration teams based across Europe, as well as Database and Application support teams when appropriate, the migration of each system was planned, scheduled via change management and executed maintaining a close working relationship with all relevant parties. Technical issues encountered were diagnosed openly and co-operatively; the resulting solutions were then used to enhance the migration procedures.

 

Midway through the project a change of scope was enforced by the customer to migrate non-replicated storage to newly purchased HDS VSP storage arrays instead of to the existing EMC VMAX storage arrays. This change was successfully incorporated into the technical design and the delivery runbooks were modified to include the use of Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager as a migration tool.

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The Reason

The Citi management were impressed with our robust processes and thorough approach on other engagements at Citi and asked us to bid for the migration activity against the incumbent Vendors who normally looked after migrations for them. As well as being the most cost effective solution, Citi were impressed by the clearly defined scope and targets in our bid but in particular, our approach; working closely with the Citi technical stakeholders to communicate the reason for change, methodology and risk management. These initial workshops to build confidence and understanding were key to fast deployment. Our multi-disciplined technical skills and customer focus allowed us to deliver the project on time and within budget, even providing additional cost savings through unused storage reclamations in the virtualised storage environment.