The Customer

IT infrastructure consultancy and services organisation delivering migration services to one of the world's leading mobile communications providers.

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The Requirement

The provision of Storage infrastructure support within the Customer's Project team responsible for the migration of virtual and physical servers from a legacy Cisco SAN with EMC DMX4, HP 3PAR and IBM storage arrays to a new Brocade SAN with EMC VPLEX/VMAX storage arrays for their client.

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The Solution

Data collection and analysis of the storage infrastructure to ensure the data integrity and risk optimized migrations for the projects host-based methodology including Storage vMotion for the existing virtual servers, PlateSpin for P2V migrations and LVM mirroring for UNIX physical servers.

 

The Delivery

Detailed analysis of the legacy EMC DMX4 arrays to provide a granular view of the array configurations and host connections.  Based on our analysis, customer migrations could be prioritised to first release legacy storage saving the customer £1M where vendor imposed deadlines would have incurred additional maintenance costs.

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Detailed array configuration information provided by the client's Storage Management team was analysed to produce a detailed report outlining the connected host details, the type and amount of storage allocated to each host, cluster shared storage configurations and all anomalies and considerations.

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Legacy Cisco SAN fabrics and Storage array configurations were thoroughly analysed and a comprehensive list of connected devices was produced.  Taking information from the zoning databases and array configuration lookup tables were created to simplify the location of key data such as WWPN-to-Alias required to identify and categorise the correct hosts for migration or decommissioning.

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Leading into the migrations we provided methodology assessments and alternative migration approaches as appropriate.  Vendor host qualification matrices and best practice documentation was provided to validate the final configurations.  The procedure proposed for connecting the blade chassis to both the Cisco and Brocade fabric environments simultaneously was also validated prior to a successful implementation.

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We were available throughout the migrations as necessary, picking up issues such as a perceived performance anomaly over the expected transfer rates from the HP 3PAR arrays to the EMC VPLEX/VMAX arrays.  Performance analysis and reports were produced to provide baseline statistics and on-going monitoring of IO performance on both sets of arrays.  The result of the performance analysis indicated that the problem lay with the configuration of the HP 3PAR; with no options available to mitigate the problem the migration timings and scheduled migration windows were adjusted to compensate for the lower than expected transfer rates. With updated achievable schedules the remaining migrations could go ahead as planned.

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The Reason

The reputation and skills of our consultants was well known to members of the Cloud Talent Sales Teams.  Our ability to provide skilled resources at very short notice, provide a flexible team of personnel who can deliver a consistent service throughout and deliver ahead of project deadlines meant we were ideal candidates for the project.

 

"When I saw your name come up for the project I pushed to get you engaged as soon as possible."
Adrian Overall, Cloud Talent CEO