Business Challenges

One of the BFSI industry leaders maintained its business operations through a robust virtualization setup comprising more than 200 VMware VMs spread across three data centers located in-house. However, with the rise in the cost of licensing and growing complexities in terms of scaling the system for further expansion and sustenance, the firm faced a requirement for formulating an effective migration plan to overcome its concerns.

However, since the customer’s entire infrastructure was built using VMware, the licensing terms post-Broadcom acquisition had increased the expenses by almost four times. Apart from the high costs, the challenges involved were:

• Distribution of workloads among various data centers
• Operational burden in managing the infrastructure
• Stringent regulatory compliance in the BFSI industry
• Six-month timeframe to implement migration

Approach

Star Systems started the engagement with a systematic approach to migration with well-calculated risks involved.

Firstly, there was an assessment of the workloads available on VMware’s vSphere to plan the process according to their inter-dependencies, performance, and ease of migration.

Secondly, a robust cloud architecture was established on IBM Cloud Infrastructure using Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The solution was planned to guarantee high availability, segregation of networks, and integration with enterprise systems.

As the next step, live migration with HCX (Hybrid Cloud Extension) was performed. In total, nearly 180 workloads were migrated online, ensuring that the systems would stay available during the whole migration process. The rest of the 30 legacy systems were migrated using cold migration techniques.

Impact on Business

The transition process was completed in just five months, well before the six-month deadline.

Key achievements were:

• 100% successful transition of all workloads
• No downtime during production, guaranteeing continuity in business processes
• 35% saving on infrastructure costs every month
• Scalability and flexibility due to cloud-native infrastructure
• Simplified management via cloud-based management

Now, the client can easily scale up, utilize advanced cloud services, and save money without sacrificing performance or security.