- Cloud Migration
KnitLogix performed a lift and shift migration for the client Carnival Group based in Mumbai. A successful migration requires a common understanding and an organization ability to align with the technology solutions to meet the business needs. The question was about where and how to migrate and how to leverage the benefits of cloud right from Scalability, availability, performance and cost.
About Carnival Group:
Carnival Group is a growing conglomerate with diversified business interests having offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Kochi and Bhopal, apart from being present in more than 120 cities of the country. The group continues to expand its current business venturing in to new areas further enhancing value for its stakeholders through its subsidiaries. Group’s vision further aids employment and growth opportunities across states with Carnival’s presence.
Environment :
Carnival’s Infrastructure is co located in Netmagic Data Center, Mumbai. It hosted all the critical applications in the Data Center and the core applications communicate to the edge applications that are hosted in different geographical locations across India. There are dedicated MPLS dual broadband connections with Airtel and TATA ISP’s providing uninterrupted connectivity within the sites. There are about 70 physical servers that are connected to 3PAR storage Arrays via cisco fabric switches. There are flavors of Win servers predominantly on Hyper-V environment and Unix OS’s. There are flavors of applications like CRM, Web and payroll etc.
Challenges
1. Technical changes are Cultural – Carnival IT team is apprehensive about the job prospects and technology enhancements with the company. A series of training and awareness programs were conducted for the staff to adapt.
2. Training employees can be costly and risky – Employees training is a long term process and there are risks of employees quitting their positions. KnitLogix posses the skill sets and cloud knowledge for the migration
3. Identifying the right CSP – Several components like software, licenses, applications and vendors were considered to identify the right CSP (AWS/Azure/GCP). After detailed evaluation of all of them Azure came out as a choice.
4. Existing vendor relationships – Existing vendors who leased the software,licenses and ISP’s relationships at some point need to be concluded either abruptly or in a phased approach and the transition was not easy.
5. Technical compatibility of the applications – There are many legacy applications which are not cloud friendly and apparently the SW vendors do not have their updated versions to be cloud compatible or do not know if the latest versions are compatible and a regressive testing has been performed on that aspect.
Azure Migration
Prepare – Application rationalization: The data of the infrastructure is spread across into different silos and managed by multiple departments. KnitLogix interacted with each of the departments and formulated a standard template to gather the inputs and validate it. Once done all the applications are rationalized and categorized for next steps.
Planning – Carnival critical business is cinemas and just like other business there is a downtime required to initiate the migration and test. KnitLogix worked with the business to pick a down time by evaluating the migration time for each application/Server. Once migrated all the applications were tested.
Migrate –Once we decided our CSP as Azure then we initiated the migration based on Azure migrate but the OS and software on the existing servers were not compatible with the native MS tools. Need to convert the system drivers in VHD format and then upload to Azure.
The migration is performed in multiple phases based on how the applications are rationalized.
Optimize – Once the environment is up and running in Azure. KnitLogix has taken up the opportunity of providing MSP and performing day to day management. Several performance evaluations were performed based on the metrics and a baseline is considered.