Global Bank Migrates 100,000 Workloads to the Cloud
Summary
Densify’s transformation planning software enabled faster migration and infrastructure savings of $24M.
Customer Challenge: Modernizing the Infrastructure and Migrating to an Internal Cloud
After nearly a decade of mergers and acquisitions, the infrastructure at one of the world’s largest financial service companies had grown to 140,000 systems. In an effort to deliver the business and its customers with service improvements, the organization decided to modernize its infrastructure and migrate 70% of all infrastructure to a new internal cloud.
The problem was, it took over 2 months to stand up a single workload, and their ‘rule-of-thumb’ hardware assessments resulted in grossly exaggerated funding requests. To make matters worse, they had no way to accurately determine whether a workload was even a good candidate for migration.
Densify Solution: A Factory-based Approach to Cloud Migration Planning
After an exhaustive technical review, the bank determined Densify’s enterprise-class solution was not only well suited to meet the intensive demand of migrating thousands of workloads, it also delivered an actionable set of recommendations the infrastructure team could rely on daily to maintain the optimized state.
Densify’s analytics were used to provide a standardized, methodical approach to evaluating existing virtual workloads and platform migration candidates, sizing and placing workloads. By examining utilization patterns and personalities, technical configurations and compatibility and business policies including regulatory/governing requirements Densify determined fit with possible environments, available capacity, instance catalog selections, software stacks and costs.
Densify provided specific actions to take outlining:
- Which workloads could migrate to the cloud
- Where to place workloads and how to allocate resources in order to reduce the infrastructure footprint and comply with business and operational requirements
Not only did this ensure optimal density, but every workload placement was made with a view toward the tight regulatory, service level and operational requirements in the environment.
Densify’s Control Console was also put into place in the new internal cloud environment to act as a fuel gauge on the infrastructure and reserve capacity for new workloads being brought on-board during the transformation process; optimizing placements, allocations and infrastructure decisions as changes in the environment occur.
The Results: Highly Efficient Cloud Migration, with Ongoing Density Optimization
Densify enabled the bank to:
- Significantly speed up cloud migration planning and processes
- Avoid ‘best guess’ resourcing saving $24M in hardware and conservatively increasing density by 30%
- Achieve standardization in the cloud environment
- Remove barriers created by application owners concerned about their workloads
- Densify was not only used to optimize migration to the organization’s internal cloud, but it also delivered an actionable set of recommendations the infrastructure team could rely on daily to maintain the optimized state.