Challenge
Seeking a data center exit to reduce CAPEX, a multibillion dollar CPG manufacturer needed to find a cloud solution for its legacy billing and distribution application running on AIX.
Results
With Skytap on Azure, the company successfully migrated its legacy billing and distribution application to Azure and gained application scalability and reliability while reducing CAPEX.
About the Company
A multibillion dollar US-based CPG manufacturer with over a million customers and 50,000 deliveries per day.
Challenge
The CPG manufacturer had outgrown its data center and was interested in migrating applications to the cloud to improve scalability availability while reducing CAPEX. Specifically, the company was hitting IOPS limitations on its environment due to the size of the disks on an over 30-year-old custom application that manages its billing and distribution running on AIX.
The company wanted to gain more control of its Power workloads (console, AIX patching cycles and storage patching cycles), which it did not currently have. It also wanted to gain flexibility in scaling its resources up and down along with creating a functional disaster recovery (DR) environment with business acceptable RPO/RTOs. Already cloud invested with Microsoft Azure, the company knew it wanted a solution to move its legacy application running on AIX to Azure.
Skytap Solution
The company selected Skytap as its cloud solution due to the ability to run its business-critical applications running on AIX as-is in Azure without re-writing or refactoring applications. The company worked with Skytap, systems integrator Cognizant, and its internal resources to meet the data center cutover deadline.
A pilot was initiated with IPsec tunnel connectivity setup and the company leveraged Skytap Professional Services to support required migration activities. The ExpressRoute setup was finalized ahead of the production build-out in Skytap. The company then executed a seamless cutover to Skytap on Azure over a weekend with no disruption to production workloads.
“This migration provides us with a modern, high-performance, long-term environment as well as helping to reduce our overall IT costs. It will also provide our users and customers a more stable experience for years to come.” -Chief Information Officer
Outcomes
With Skytap, the company gained control of critical AIX OS level activities, including OS/Storage patching cycles. Skytap on Azure, along with early adoption of Skytap’s new Multi-Attach Storage (MAS) feature helped the company exit its data center on time while realizing improved performance for its business-critical application.
After migrating its legacy AIX application to Azure with Skytap, the company has realized the following benefits:
- Significantly reduced CAPEX in hardware and managed services costs associated with the data center (estimated at over $1 million dollars in CAPEX savings)
- Improved application performance uptime in Skytap on Azure compared to when running on-prem
- Gained the ability to upgrade AIX to newer versions
- The application is prepared for cloud-based DR
- Smoother and faster process to perform backups and spin machines up or down
- Gained the ability to copy an instance from one Azure environment to another
“The performance has been fantastic, much better than in our data center. Uptime is improved and the backup process is much smoother. It was really easy to upgrade from one version of AIX to a newer one.”
Senior Director of Application Delivery
What’s next with Skytap
Now that the application has been successfully migrated to the cloud, the company hopes to set up a secondary region in the US East Azure region for DR, which it can do quickly with Skytap’s “copy to region” feature. The company also has plans to explore more AI use cases now that this business-critical application, and the valuable data it contains, is running in Azure.
“The service with Skytap has been fantastic. It’s one of the best vendor relationships that we have.” -Senior Director of Application Delivery
