Smartweb helps a Fortune 500 Wall Street Bank migrate 5500 servers with over 20PB storage, while improving I/O performance latencies and reducing risks.

Challenge

Smartweb, working together with our partner Dell EMC helped migrate over 20PB of storage utilized by over 5500 servers. The project involved migrating the servers over 65 EMC VMAX-1 and VMAX-2 storage arrays to VMAX-3 targets. Smartweb provided extensive storage analytics for every array and server migrating by capturing and visualizing storage performance, capacity and configuration information.

In addition to getting the older storage arrays off the floor, the project also had requirements to improve storage I/O performance, consolidate dispersed server storage and remediate host currency. Detailed analytics had to be provided to the end-users for every migrating application and servers. The desire was to create the pre-migration and post-migration baselines in fully automated manner using very minimal resources. The baseline reports needed to show performance profiles, capacity information and configuration information at the storage and host levels.

Solution

In-Scope Storage Infrastructure (12 Data Centers):
  • Source Arrays: 55 Dell EMC Symmetrix (VMAX-1, VAMX-2)
  • Target Arrays: 32 Dell EMC VMAX-3
  • SAN (Switches): Distributed Cisco 9513 SAN Fabrics
  • DR Replication: Synchronous SRDF, SRDF/A
  • Servers: 5500 servers – VMWare, Windows, Linux, Solaris

Results

  • Smartwebs BaaS instance was deployed in the bank premises to keep the data secure and to avoid shipping large quantities of data to the cloud instance.
  • Onsite/Offsite Storage SME lead the project with offsite Smartweb experts managing the toolset and reporting.
  • All 55 arrays were decommissioned without introducing risks within the one-year project timeframe. I/O Profiles were created for each server showing pre-vs-post migration views. 100% of the migrations achieved better performance by improving latencies, IOPS or MBPS bandwidth post-migration.
  • Fully automated data collections and analysis for large number of arrays was used. Over 5500 pre-vs-post migration IO profile reports were produced weekly on 90 day rolling data basis.
  • Reduced costs by storage optimization with minimal client resources required
IT THE RIGHT WAY

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