Migrating thousands of globally distributed machines to Google Cloud—with zero downtime

1 min read
Sep 5, 2023

Overview

Industries
Information Technology, 
Utilities/Resources

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.

– Jamie Sidey, Optiva

 

 

Minimal downtime

to migrate to Google Cloud 

 

Reduced annual data center costs by 90%

 ($15 million to $1.5 million) 
through migration, consolidation, and optimization

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