One of the largest worldwide courier service providers has recently implemented an intensive migration process that took place over a two-year period.
In the past, the company had over 25 country-center-locations that collected and processed all the transactions and deliveries from around that particular country. As part of a strategic cost-cutting decision, the company decided to close down these locations and center them in a single location.
Once the decision was made, the company searched for a stable, cross platform file transfer tool that was both reliable and efficient. After careful evaluation, FASTCopy was chosen as the backbone transfer technology for the migration process. In the relevant countries, all central UNIX servers were replaced with UNIX hosts for centralized storage.
The brown-field custom-built DataCentres are located in UK. The international DataCentres are connected to the UK DataCentres via frame relay 64kbps / 256kbps circuits over which critical production traffic was flowing 24x7.
A total of some 480 servers were migrated including bespoke and third party application binaries as well as production data files:- Oracle, Unibol and Informix. Informix raw disk instances were first archived to disk and Level 0/1/2 archives transported.
The solution required the following features:
§ The solution must make best use of the available narrow bandwidths to move large volumes of data.
§ Ability to reduce / negate any effect on production WAN traffic.
§ Reduction of downtime to application hosts to an absolute minimum
§ Installation of any software onto hosts must not require a reboot or kernel configuration. The solution must be application based and not at disk driver level.
§ The product must be robust and reliable
§ The product must be able to be bundled and deployed to 800 hosts to meet with the aggressive migration plan
FASTCopy was integrated into the migration of all file system data from 400+ HP-UX hosts located at 16 European entities (23 countries), to replacement hosts distributed across two sites in the UK.
The international communication links were typically 16KBs to 256KBs with 24x7 production traffic; consequently, FASTCopy’s throttling and control features were critical in the process of the data migration.
The fact that the FASTCopy functions at application level, meant that the host configuration and domiciled business applications were unaffected. The company did not experience any application errors or faults during the production data transfers.