(in)famous company & ORBIT
While we were discussing with the customer whether he should invest in expanding his HW or rather move to a cloud solution, he had an accident. Our service intervention accelerated the debate. What was at stake? How did we manage to resuscitate the paralyzed company? And how can the customer prevent a similar scenario from happening again?
Failed data migration
What happened to this design engineering firm?
The IT department had a busy weekend planned in preparation for the upgrade. But no one expected that on two consecutive days and at the same time a significant failure of one of the overloaded data stores.
It turned out that it would take more than a week to restore 25 TB of data from the cloud backup of the data storage manufacturer. Meanwhile, the company's IT systems would be fully or partially down. The customer's IT was on its knees at that point - and with it, essentially, the entire company.
COMPUTATIONAL LIMITS TO GROWTH OR HOW IT ALL STARTED
Six years ago, we built a Citrix farm for this customer to virtualize the desktops of designers and engineers. The successful project saved him time in endpoint administration and increased the efficiency and mobility of his engineers.
Since then, however, the real number of customer users has doubled. The original hardware was not designed for these numbers and failed to provide high availability to users.
If a company wants to stay with a HW solution in a similar situation, it must keep computing reserves and not "squeeze" all resources to the maximum. However, if it needs these capacities urgently, it must simply buy additional resources.
So the customer was deciding whether to invest in expanding the HW or moving to a cloud solution. The data storage crash accelerated the decision process.
"Holiday" service intervention
At that point, the IT administrator had no choice but to ask ORBIT, the company's service partner, for service intervention. For Peter Lenz and his colleagues, the long weekend took an unplanned turn.
Understanding the situation is a prerequisite for making informed decisions. That's why the service team first verified an accurate history of eventsthat led to the situation.
Given the state of the data storage, there was a real possibility on the table that the customer really would have no choice but to go without data for a week. Thanks to an almost unrelenting determination to solve the problem, the colleagues eventually found a way to move data from the crashed storage to a spare and start the systems gradually from there.
Even so, it took restoring the operation of the company's basic IT services for almost three days. Fortunately, it's short enough to allow users to work normally when they return to work.
Everything bad (service intervention) is good for something (taking action)
Although human factors were also involved, the failure may not have occurred. The service intervention proved that the customer cannot rely on technology that is continuously operating at maximum capacity. It must provide new resources for its needs.
A few weeks later, the company took the decision situate key technologies in the cloudwhere it lack of resources will not limit. This will minimise the risk of a similar situation recurring.
How to implement such a transition? First, we made the transition for the customer have developed a detailed strategythat prepared him for sustainable cloud adoption and gave him a realistic idea of the business cost savings. This was then successfully tested in a proof-of-concept.
The result will be a tailored new and truly flexible IT environment that will improve the company's operations. We will be using the proposed solution for the entire duration of its operation support and further develop it. The customer will thus be able to devote himself to his own development, and not worrying about the vitality of the IT environment.