Atos is one of the world’s largest IT services providers and a leader in digital services, with 2013 pro forma annual revenue of €10 billion and 86,000 employees in 66 countries. Serving a global client base, the Group provides Consulting & Systems Integration services, Managed Services & BPO, Cloud operations, Big Data & Security solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry.
As a leading Cloud Service Provider, Atos needed to help customers and prospects take advantage of the cloud to increase the flexibility and scalability of their IT infrastructures while optimizing the price-performance. The key challenge was to enable the migration to the cloud of hundreds of critical production workloads without business disruption. In some cases, the task was to virtualize existing physical servers and migrate them to the cloud, while in other cases the source environments were already fully virtualized.
Joris Haverkort, Head of Cloud Services Engineering at Atos, said: “Cloud hosting is now a completely mature model, and many businesses today are running mission-critical workloads on private or public cloud infrastructures. As our customers and prospects seek to optimize their IT landscapes, we aim to capture the opportunities by helping them realize their cloud objectives quickly and without disruption."
Atos looked for a solution that would enable it to migrate to the cloud – easily and at low risk – both physical servers and virtual workloads.
“One of the key challenges we identified was migrating workloads efficiently,” said Joris Haverkort. “We were keen to reduce storage requirements by shrinking the target disk for servers where the source disk had significant unused space. We also saw further opportunities for greater efficiency: for example, physical servers load drivers for optical and even floppy drives, which are not needed for virtual machines... To reduce the cost and time required to perform each migration, we wanted a way to remove unwanted code quickly and easily.”
He added: “PlateSpin Migrate was the best solution we found that could offer truly multi-modal migration options: not just physical-to-virtual, but also physical-to-physical, virtual-to-virtual and even virtual-to-physical. PlateSpin was exciting for us, because with a single product, we would be able to meet the needs of almost any cloud migration project. Moreover, the PlateSpin solution automatically removes components that are no longer needed in the target environment, such as disk drivers in the case of physical-to-virtual migrations, and VMware Tools in the case of virtual-to-virtual migrations – for example, VMware to Hyper-V. The PlateSpin solution also installs additional components that are needed in the target environment, such as Hyper-V Integration Services when the target is a Microsoft Hyper-V environment. This enables us to avoid unnecessary manual steps and accelerate our migrations.
“Finally, PlateSpin Migrate allows us to set the target disk size to meet the actual needs of each server, rather than simply replicating the size of the disk from the source environment... For a large number of migrations, the ongoing cost savings are compelling.”
Using PlateSpin Migrate, Atos is now able to mass-migrate up to 60 customer workloads to the cloud over a single weekend, without disruption to critical production systems. “Our Micro Focus solution proved its value almost immediately when one of our largest customers needed to migrate its physical servers to a new data center quickly,” said Joris Haverkort. “Using PlateSpin Migrate, we were able to complete 61 migrations within the targeted migration windows, saving an average of four hours’ migration time per server. Without PlateSpin Migrate, meeting this deadline would simply have been too challenging.
“Better still, PlateSpin Migrate offers the same level of performance and automation, whether you are aiming to consolidate hardware through virtualization, move workloads from one data center to another, or move workloads into a private or public cloud.”
Joris Haverkort said: “Faster migrations naturally translate into lower costs for our customers. More important still, the standardized approach means that the risk of data loss and unplanned downtime is practically eliminated – giving customers confidence that their business-critical systems remain safe as they move into the cloud. Thanks to the Micro Focus solution, we have strengthened the value proposition of our cloud and managed services offerings – enabling us to capture valuable new opportunities and grow the business.”
