faster workload migration with minimal downtime
Atos, a digital service provider, must assist clients with large-scale server migrations to Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will help them realize the operational cost savings of moving to the cloud.
With its cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across various business sectors. Atos is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.
The cloud migration solution chosen must support multiple migration types, minimize downtime, scale to support the largest migration projects, and provide reliable migration services.
With digital transformation, companies continuously modernize their IT, innovate, and rapidly shift to cloud based models. Many Atos clients are interested in a cloud environment to reduce their operational costs, create a higher availability platform with an uptime guarantee of 99.999%, improve their security, and centralize their IT management.
However, providing reliable migration services to these clients was challenging without a unifying migration solution like PlateSpin Migration Factory. Many platforms, including cloud platforms, come with native migration tools, but these tools lack the scalability and manageability of a true enterprise-grade migration solution. Having to use multiple tools for different migration types increased costs in terms of training and the potential for human error. Furthermore, platform tools often lack advanced features for keeping downtime to a minimum and allowing necessary test cycles before cutting servers over to the cloud.
Pieter Talsma – HEAD OF TTS
Atos
Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with approximately 100,000 employees in 72 countries and annual revenue of around €12 billion. European number one in Big Data, Cybersecurity, High Performance Computing and Digital Workplace, the Group provides Cloud services, Infrastructure & Data Management, Business & Platform solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline.
To migrate the datacenter workloads to the cloud, Atos has chosen PlateSpin from Micro Focus. Stephan Riebroek, TTS Migration Factory Manager for Atos, comments on this decision: “We wanted a flexible solution that has earned our trust in large-scale projects before. At Atos, we don’t just support cloud migrations, we also help our clients migrate between physical datacenters or from a cloud environment back to an on-premise environment. We found PlateSpin Migration Factory works well in all these scenarios and we knew we could count on it to minimize downtime while dealing with many different bandwidths and a large variety of server workloads.”
Atos is in a great position to compare PlateSpin with other solutions in the marketplace and Riebroek illustrates why they like it: “We feel PlateSpin has a maturity not many other solutions have right now. This is demonstrated by the fact that our manual effort, both before and after a workload migration, is virtually eliminated if we deploy PlateSpin. In fact, I estimate that we complete workload migrations 50 percent faster if we leverage PlateSpin. The technical teams behind PlateSpin are very knowledgeable and provide great support whenever we need it.”
The Atos team takes advantage of key PlateSpin features to minimize the impact on business users and migrate server workloads as transparently as possible. The intelligent PlateSpin migration preparation means that when the actual migration happens, the team can be fully confident of a good outcome, as PlateSpin has checked all the target servers and will have warned the team of any issues that might negatively affect migration, such as missing drivers. The ability to create comprehensive test environments is another failsafe method to ensure a successful workload migration.
PlateSpin Migration Factory offers other capabilities really appreciated by Riebroek: “We have the ability to schedule a full server workload for automated migration in off-peak hours. We do all the preparation work during office hours, and leave PlateSpin to execute the migration when it will least affect users. We don’t need to be there either; a full report tells us exactly what happened when we return. The PlateSpin dashboard enables us to keep the overview of many sub-projects as part of a major project. We can make it really granular, with different views for different job functions within the project group, and a high-level overview for management to gain a real-time at-a-glance project overview.”
Stephan Riebroek – TTS MIGRATION FACTORY MANAGER
Atos
Atos is actively helping clients achieve the benefits they were hoping for: reduced operational costs and improved key performance indicators (KPIs). Migrated systems are reported as stable and the workload migrations are done as transparently as possible to minimize any business impact.
Pieter Talsma, Head of Atos TTS, concludes: “The partnership we have with Micro Focus has strengthened over the years and our mutual trust is the reason we don’t hesitate to recommend PlateSpin. Partnering with Micro Focus enables us to deliver on the promise we make to our clients.”
