Migrating and Upgrading a Legacy System

With a legacy, on premises data center using expensive and scarce real estate, a university in one of the country’s largest cities decided it was time to migrate their data to the cloud. Motivated by the need for more classroom space and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), they committed to vacating their existing data center, housing more than 2,200 servers, within 18 months — an aggressive timeline for any organization. Based on their exemplary track record with previous engagements, CDW was recommended by AWS to partner with the university to move the infrastructure to the AWS cloud. This is the story of how we helped.

Housing an on-premises data center in the middle of a major U.S. city had become untenable for this university. They needed the valuable real estate for classrooms, and their current environment consisted of segmented servers running operating systems and software. The university needed a partner well versed in cloud migration to accomplish their goal of transferring all of their data to the cloud in 18 months.

CDW already had a relationship with the university and had completed a few smaller projects for them in the past. As an AWS partner with a Migration Consulting Competency, and with previous experience migrating other major universities to the cloud, we were an obvious choice. The fact that CDW also had extensive experience with Oracle, which the university required as part of their infrastructure, was an added bonus. In addition to migration and reducing TCO, CDW established a third objective for the university: retiring technical debt as part of the mass migration effort.

To kick off the project, CDW leveraged its proprietary SkyMap tool and other third-party discovery utilities to review and analyze the university’s infrastructure. We needed to identify which servers were candidates for migration, as well as determine processing power, memory and disk allocation capabilities.

After analyzing the infrastructure, we found that the university’s data environment not only consisted of multiple data centers, but also servers that were running various versions of both Linux and Windows operating systems. In addition, the environment was broken out into different security zones based on data privacy requirements — an environment they’d need to replicate to keep university records secure.

During this review period, one of the more considerable challenges CDW uncovered was that legacy and non-supported servers would need to be re-platformed — moving to a different operating system entirely, a much more complex process than a simple rehosting — before migrating to the cloud. Mapping the university’s different security zones to AWS environment also proved to be a challenge, requiring separate virtual private clouds (VPCs) to retain current security and privacy requirements.

Here are the steps CDW used to plan the migration:

CDW used the current data and bandwidth usage to calculate how much disk space would be needed in the cloud. One of the university’s goals was to reduce TCO, so CDW tirelessly went server by server, app by app, and environment by environment to predict and optimize storage and computing costs using  AWS EC2 instances.

Working backward from the 18-month deadline, CDW created a full migration plan using “waves” of server and app migrations, prioritizing apps that used fewer servers to minimize risk. This also allowed them to evaluate each migration wave so that subsequent moves could take the lessons learned from previous waves as they grew more complex.

The plan included a deep dive into Oracle, their database environment, which would be moved to the on-premises instance to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Due to the short bursts of allowed downtime, the CDW team scheduled the Oracle migration for weekends so university operations could continue during normal business hours.

After working with IT Services, the security team, cloud engineers and the network operations center, CDW was able to provide the university with a centralized management system for their infrastructure and related services. This allowed for standardization of processes and technology and increased collaboration between the university’s IT and their departments and functional units. Now the infrastructure is scalable, secure and agile, taking advantage of the faster performance and disaster recovery capabilities of the AWS cloud.

The financial advantages were also a major win: the new data structure will save the university approximately $3.8M annually, resulting in a five-year ROI of 120%. Interdepartmental revenue, driven by centralizing school-owned servers, is estimated to increase by 18%. And none of these savings take into account the real estate assets that were freed up, or the vast time savings that come with more efficient upgrades and maintenance.

Moving student and administration applications from an on premises environment to the AWS cloud in only 18 months was no small feat, but CDW’s meticulous planning and preparation made the process as smooth as possible for the university. Thanks to SkyMap and CDW’s experience with cloud migration, the university now enjoys improved automation, standardized platforms, and enhanced speed and recovery. The university is now positioned to focus on more value-add services — a significant win for both administration and students.