Away from the sheet metal – off to the cloud

On the 4th floor of the office building, a change of user and utilisation was pending, approximately 250m2 of space had to be rededicated from the server room to modern offices with access and utilisation control in the context of VS-NfD. The space is occupied by 27 19″ racks (40 U) including extensive wiring, uplink connections and other auxiliary and supplementary furniture. Over 220 applications run on the servers, and various backup tape systems and a NAS are also in use. CONVIDIUS started with an inventory of the applications and server usage, supplemented by documentation of the network connections and the running backup/recovery jobs as well as the inspection of hundreds of tapes in the additional room specially set up for storage.

The migration was carried out by virtualising the sheet metal servers into an ESXi infrastructure. CONVIDIUS created a sprint approach based on the Scrum methodology, which scheduled the migration of the applications and servers for two-week sprints. All tasks were kept in a migration backlog and regularly refined before each sprint change. Through this approach, the entire migrated application landscape was documented simultaneously. In the process, more than 50 applications were identified that were no longer used or had been replaced by other applications. In this way, a not insignificant amount of licence fees and virtual servers could be saved in order to reduce the overall energy consumption of the new virtualised environment.

CONVIDIUS was always present on site, organising the dismantling of the servers and infrastructure and carrying it out themselves. A full service from a single source, including planning, migration, dismantling and disposal.