A global manufacturer needed to improve the scalability, performance and security of the IT landscape – while at the same time also reducing cost. The existing IT environment was no longer able to fulfill these requirements. Therefore, the manufacturer decided to modernize the entire IT landscape and transfer the operational model to managed IT services. Based on our experience and long-lasting relationship, our customer chose Itility as their migration- and services-partner.

Their datacenter was located in Eindhoven, hosting a range of globally-used applications that are in use 24x7, whilst the new datacenter is in Amsterdam. This IT landscape was at the heart of daily operations, supporting PLM, Microsoft Dynamics, and several proprietary applications.

There are many interdependencies between operational processes and between applications, so it was critical to align well with all application owners to create the best possible migration scenarios and reduce potential downtime to a minimum.

We provided architectural advice, helped with the selection of hardware, designed an elaborate modernization strategy with minimum business disruption, and executed the plan. By combining life cycle management with the migration to the new datacenter, we were able to prevent unnecessary downtime. And of course: compressing life cycle management in a shorter time frame tends to reduce the average cost of hardware as you increase your buying power.

We first implemented the platform: our IT Factory Managed IT services platform. This ensured we could proactively manage the new environment from the start. The platform offers full observability and ‘hands-off-operations’.

We then built a new storage environment in Amsterdam and transferred data to this new environment. In the meantime, we implemented the rest of the IT infrastructure and prepared it for the migration of applications to the new virtualized environment. Thanks to the chosen strategy, this migration was done without any downtime.

Of course there were also some physical machines hosting applications, mostly to comply with licensing requirements. These were migrated based on scheduled downtime, as quickly and seamlessly as possible in full alignment with the application owners.

After completing all migrations, with the new IT landscape ‘live’ in our management system, we thoroughly checked the scalability and assessed performance, security and costs – all green! A significantly better performance at lower cost.

The last phase was to decommission the complete datacenter in Eindhoven, eliminating all direct costs associated with the previous IT landscape.

As with any large project, there will always be setbacks and delays. But thanks to our own project management methodology and very good team collaboration, the project finished two weeks before the deadline.

A team of dedicated Itilians is now responsible for the ‘always-on’ IT landscape of our customer.