Migrating thousands of globally distributed machines to Google Cloud—with zero downtime
Optiva, a Canada-based company that develops software for communications service providers, already had plans to migrate to Google Cloud to become more agile and reduce costs. However, as it grew and acquired other companies, Optiva found itself in possession of many outdated assets located in data centers all over the world—complicating its goal of quickly and easily moving all of its assets to the cloud. Facing a complex and daunting task, Optiva asked Google for help. Google referred Optiva to Pythian, one of its top partners, to get the job done.
Following multiple acquisitions, Optiva had 10 data centers around the world housing more than 3,500 machines that run more than 50 operating systems—many of them extremely out of date. Some of the machines also had licensing issues that made it difficult to migrate them to Google Cloud. Optiva needed to move all its workloads to the cloud within six months, and extended downtime was not an option as its internal teams required constant server access to do their jobs.
Before a contract was even signed, Pythian consulted with Optiva to understand its IT environment, workloads, organizational structure, and ambitions for the cloud—and to identify potential challenges that might arise during the cloud journey. This in-depth analysis allowed Pythian to vet its assumptions about how the migration would work so it could hit the ground running once the contract was finalized. Thanks to a globally distributed team, Pythian has the capabilities to work around the clock to ensure the migration progresses as smoothly as possible.
What we did
Determined an optimal cloud migration pattern for the company and used live migration technology to eliminate downtime
Applied cloud-native best practices to tune and enhance the company’s servers and operating systems to ensure optimal performance in the Google Cloud environment
Technologies used
Google Cloud Platform
Google Compute Engine
CloudEndure
Key Outcomes
Pythian had the best price and the best approach, with a world-class team of really outstanding resources, which they made available to us on an elastic basis, so we didn’t have to pay for the whole team the whole time. We also valued their deep relationship with Google—that stamp of approval was meaningful for us.
