Cross Country Datacenter Migration for Commercial Operation Systems
CLIENT OVERVIEW
CGI Group, Inc. is a North American multinational information technology consulting company, specializing in systems integration solutions and outsourcing. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, the company has more than 35 years of long-term growth with 69,000 professionals in 40 countries.
THE CHALLENGE
In 2004, CGI’s wholly owned subsidiary, CGI Virginia, acquired American Management Systems, Inc. (AMS). Due to the merger, all CGI Virginia commercial operation systems in the Fairfax, VA datacenter had to be moved to Phoenix, AZ. CGI contracted Neovera to help migrate their systems. Neovera worked with CGI in Fairfax and Phoenix to develop a migration strategy and build a project plan recognizing the constraints of time, availability, and age of systems and equipment. The move included over 50 systems including AD, Exchange, Notes, File Systems, SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint, and many undocumented and unsupported systems across multiple platforms such as Windows NT, 2000, 2003, Solaris, and multiple variants of Linux.
NEOVERA SOLUTION
Neovera’s strategy involved a multi-tiered approach. The team was responsible for the replication of data during the transition through scripts, host-based and application-based techniques. To achieve this, a virtual environment was setup in Phoenix to host the Fairfax systems. Older systems and other candidate applications were virtualized in Fairfax and then replicated to Phoenix and directly virtualized over the network to Phoenix. Systems that could not be virtualized and could not be reproduced (due to lack of installation software or lack of application support) were backed up to physical drives and manually transported to Phoenix. Several systems, such as Solaris, were backed up and reinstalled on Sun Servers in Phoenix while others required similar hardware in Phoenix to operate.
BOTTOM LINE RESULTS
Neovera completed the migration on time and on budget over a period of four months. Our team of engineers successfully managed both virtual and physical environments while anticipating common setbacks, such as lack of software or application support. Neovera satisfied every project requirement and completed the migration with no unscheduled downtime.