The Use Case
In the highly regulated financial services industry, system failure is not an option; any downtime to business-critical systems could create a significant impact to business, revenue and reputation.
We were recently approached by one of our Reseller Partners, CTC, on behalf of a client in the financial services industry. The client was looking to migrate their entire business infrastructure of over 190 systems from one virtual platform (RHEL) into another (VMWare).
Challenges
The main challenge for this client was being able to migrate their entire infrastructure while keeping them running. Each system was critical to the daily working of this business in enabling them to perform their core duties.
Alongside this, confidence in the migration would be crucial. The client needed to ensure that the approach taken was robust and repeatable, particularly for the more critical production systems.
The Cristie Product Solution
Cristie were approached to deliver a CloneManager migration solution for the client.
CloneManager is a system replication and migration software that creates identical copies of critical systems that can be instantly used in the event of a disaster.
After being assessed against several competitors, Cristie were found to have the favoured solution both from a functionality and ROI point of view, when compared to other solution and manual migrations.
Implementation and Approach
An extensive POC period followed, where the Cristie support team worked with the partner to ensure that the methodology and approach to this solution were rigorously tested. It was essential that this took place to make sure that the migration strategy planned was robust and repeatable, as required.
The deployment of the migrations was coordinated out of core working hours to avoid any potential downtime. This allowed the partner to carry out the migrations, and the client to fully test configuration and applications prior to the final cutover to the new target environment.
Results
Having successfully migrated the client to the new environment, the main benefits for them of the CloneManager solution were as follows:
Migration stability using the Cristie Virtual Appliance (VA).
The Cristie VA – which enables centralised management for all the types of machine migration and disaster recovery software that we offer – provided a consistent platform to manage and administer the migrations. The holistic view provided by the VA made migration actions straightforward to apply to multiple systems simultaneously.
Fleet visibility.
With a large fleet of systems, the Cristie VA allowed for easy processing of systems across the board to ensure project timeframes could easily be measured and checked throughout.
Commercially efficient.
Given the ROI for the migrations with CloneManager, Cristie were able to minimise the investment required as part of this systems upgrade making the overall system upgrade overheads more commercially efficient for the Client.
Dissimilar hardware flexibility.
CloneManager’s approach, which focuses on dissimilar hardware, allowed the Partner to provide a more flexible approach. This approach focused on the systems’ OS rather than hardware platform, helping to ensure a seamless transition between differing environments.
Summary
Cristie CloneManager enabled our partner to implement a successful virtual to virtual migration for the Client, without any system downtime.
CloneManager is managed from the Cristie Virtual Appliance, allowing a single management interface to control the whole DR process if required.
Cristie works in recovery and replication to and from physical, virtual and cloud environments, and we’re trusted by over a third of Fortune 500 companies.
If you’d like to learn more about what we offer, click here to take a tour of our products. And you can book a free trial of CloneManager here.
‘ CloneManager is the best product I have found for server disaster recovery by keeping the DR side up-to-date with the production servers.’
Senior Systems Administrator, Global supplier to automotive industry
