Sungard - Case Study

Fully Managed Data Centre Migration

Sungard - Fully Managed Data Centre Migration– Case Study

The Challenge

GAIN Capital is a US-based provider of online trading services, headquartered in Bedminster, New Jersey. The company provides market access and trade execution services in foreign exchange, contracts for difference and exchange-based products to retail investors.

GAIN Capital existing Comms Room was based within an office environment. Their requirement was to relocate their equipment to a new location due to the expiration of their lease. GAIN chose to take advantage of this opportunity by migrating their Comms equipment to a managed service environment, as they already had existing infrastructure at Interxion Data Centre. GAIN also wanted to reduce their physical infrastructure footprint before migrating. In order to reduce the footprint prior to the physical migration, it was a requirement to perform virtual migrations.As migration partner to Sungard, we were approached to provide a fully managed, Data Centre migration solution for their client Herbert Smith, an international legal practice with a 1,300-lawyer network across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Required a fully managed internal migration
Migrating a total of 100 rack mounted servers, 50 comms devices and 8 NetApp cabinets
48 hour project window
London Internal

The Solution

Planning and Project Management

Technimove Professional Services team were engaged by GAIN Capital to lead and develop the migration programme. The programme consisted of a discovery phase, environment readiness, virtual/physical migration delivery and dilapidation of all decommissioned hardware.Our migration methodology is designed to focus on minimising downtime, reducing risk and guaranteeing the efficient delivery of server migration projects. A key element of this process is ensuring that your Project Manager has prepared for the challenges and utilised the available resources in the most effective way. Due to an increase in spatial requirement, Herbert Smith were forced to move internally to a larger area within Sungard’s LTC facility and timescales were tight.

There are several factors that could potentially cause issues in a migration such as this. In this instance, cable management was the largest concern. Cable management is an intricate and time-consuming part of a move and as such, we recommended to carry out a Pre-Cable of the target destination facility ahead of the migration.

The Pre Cable

The Result

Pre-Cabling is a key strategy for ensuring that we achieve our goal of minimising downtime on the day of the project. With Sungard, this meant our Engineers were pre-cabling new racks at the new internal location 4 weeks ahead of the migration. As part of this process, we installed the copper and fibre cables in line with a specific set of requirements outlined by our partners.In partnership with Sungard, a combination of Project Management coupled with pre-migration cabling, ensured this project was a complete success on time and on budget.

As a result, we delivered above and beyond expectations by completing the project an hour ahead of schedule, which gave Herbert Smith more time to adjust to their new environment.

Sungard were extremely impressed with both the pre-migration planning and the smooth execution of the relocation and continue to utilise Technimove as their migration partner.

Banking / Server Migration / Professional Services / Project Management