Improving Efficiency of Data Center Modernization

ReadyWorks was selected to help migrate one of the bank’s largest data centers to three separate facilities including a private cloud, a backup data center, and a co-location facility. RBC used ReadyWorks to automate the entire program and completed the migration on schedule and without any major disruption of services. Following the successful completion of this program, ReadyWorks was utilized to manage the migration of another data center for the bank.

Faced with a looming deadline to vacate its New York data center, the bank wanted a better, automated process to manage the migration. With more than 200 applications, 2500 physical and virtual servers, and 200 databases in a mixed OS environment—Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware ESXI—and 87 percent of its hardware reaching end of life (EOL), the bank needed an accurate, real-time, comprehensive view of its environment including servers, storage, applications, workloads and users. They needed a way to visualize all the interdependencies between these to determine what should be moved, what should be re-architected, and what should be retired.

• Get an accurate, 360° view of the data center to eliminate risk of business disruption during the migration.
• Leverage this information to determine optimal workload placement, migration readiness, and wave plans.
• Complete the migration on or ahead of schedule.
• Reduce or eliminate the need for additional internal project management resources.
• Leverage information collected during the migration to maintain up-to-date records about each of the environments going forward.

The bank went through an extensive evaluation process including review of an installed system they hoped would be able to handle the migration. Once they realized the current system was insufficient to meet their requirements, they decided to replace it with ReadyWorks.

ReadyWorks was selected based on its automation capabilities including data discovery and analysis, dependency mapping, dynamic wave planning, workflow automation, scheduling, runbook generation, and reporting.

ReadyWorks reduced the program timeline by 30%, ensuring the data center migration was completed ahead of schedule. By leveraging the platform’s ability to ingest and aggregate information from existing systems and spreadsheets, the bank was able to develop an accurate inventory of assets and applications and rationalize the applications to reduce redundancies and costs.

The platform saved the team valuable time and energy by automating the entire program. ReadyWorks made it easy for them to:

• Build dependency and relationship maps.
• Identify workloads that needed to be moved together.
• Build wave plans.
• Track migration readiness.
• Identify bottlenecks.
• Manage system and team tasks.
• Communicate with stakeholders.
• Report on migration status.