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The Customer

BoyleSports is the largest and most successful independently-owned bookmaker in the Republic of Ireland.

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The Requirement

BoyleSports purchased a Pure Storage FlashArray to replace an existing EMC XtremIO. Along with the Boyle Sports VMWare environment, the data from the 2-node MSCS Failover Cluster running Boyle Sports most Business Critical Oracle Database services needed to be migrated with minimal downtime in a specific time window. Failure to migrate within the window or performance degradation would result in severe financial losses for BoyleSports.

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The Solution

The solution provided Technical and Project Management resources to define the migration procedures, perform the data migrations and to track and report on overall progress on a regular basis.  CirrusData DMS appliances, using CirrusData TDI technology, were selected to perform the data migration. The CirrusData hardware was configured as an HA cluster enabling the data to be migrated in the background at a block level and provide the limited downtime requirement. The Cirrus DMS Hardware would be rented for a period of 4 weeks. Additional consultancy was included to validate best practice deployment following the customer ESXi migration activities.

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The Reason

Minimal downtime and maintaining the high levels of performance was absolutely essential. This critical project required experienced technicians and robust processes that could guarantee the lowest risk and predictable timings. The ability to migrate data in the background between 2 different Vendor storage arrays using CirrusData DMS, with downtime only required during host cutover, was key.

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The Delivery

The project was delivered in three phases to validate performance and availability through each change.

Phase 1 of the project saw our consultants install and configure the Pure Storage array and CirrusData DMS4000 hardware whilst performance was under continual customer scrutiny. With no detected loss of performance, the hardware was left in place and monitored for an extended period before implementing the next phase.

Phase 2 - The Cirrus DMS was inserted non-disruptively into the data paths and after a short period of performance observation the Data Migration was initiated. The Oracle data was transferred within estimates with the quality of service and data transfer configured to guarantee avoidance of any performance impact. Subsequent Delta copies maintained the data synchronicity on an hourly basis until the final cutover. 

Phase 3 - The detailed cutover process was created and documented in order to cutover the cluster nodes to the Pure Storage //m50R2 array during a short, scheduled maintenance window.  The CirrusData DMS was decommissioned and packed ready for return to CirrusData.

The project was completed with zero impact to the Production application and within the timescales and budget set by the Customer.
 

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