RBC Migrates Data Center in 30% Less Time

Challenge: With the deadline looming to vacate its New York data center, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) wanted to migrate to three facilities: a private cloud, backup data center, and co-location facility. As one of the bank’s largest data centers, it housed more than 200 applications, 2500 physical and virtual servers, and 200 databases in a mixed OS environment - Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware ESXI. 87% of hardware was nearing end of life (EoL), and the bank needed an accurate, real-time view of the environment - servers, storage, applications, workloads. users, and all interdependencies - to identify the appropriate workflows.

Solution: Following an extensive evaluation process, RBC selected ReadyWorks to automate the entire program, and manage the migration without major service disruption. Following the successful completion, RBC chose ReadyWorks to manage another data center migration.

Using ReadyWorks, RBC was able to:

• Condense the project timeline by 30%.
• Reduce project management costs by 40%.
• Replace/retire 87% of hardware.
• Modernize the data center architecture (server, network, storage).

“ReadyWorks made it possible for us to execute the migration ahead of schedule without major disruption. They also reduced the project management workload to the degree where we didn’t need any additional project management resources.”

ReadyWorks enabled this through:

• System Integration: ReadyWorks connected to RBC’s existing sources of record, including systems and spreadsheets, to access and integrate their data and capabilities.
• Data Intelligence: ReadyWorks provided the team with a super dashboard view of all data center assets – providing a comprehensive view of all servers, applications, databases, and their interdependencies. This allowed RBC to make informed decisions on application rationalization, identify workloads that should be moved together, build, and populate migration waves, track readiness, identify bottlenecks and more. The bank could see the program status in real-time and benefit from up-to-date records on each environment moving forward.
• Orchestration and Automation: As well as automating data aggregation and correlation, ReadyWorks automation was used to manage system and team tasks, communicate with stakeholders and report on the migration status.

“From dependency mapping to the completed migration, the ReadyWorks platform simplified everything. Based on our initial success we have already tapped ReadyWorks for another upcoming data center migration program.”