A success story on data center consolidation into Microsoft Azure
According to IDC’s 2021 survey, the energy sector, specifically oil and gas companies, generally lacks an enterprise-wide strategy to move operational data to the Cloud. This sector has been an inherently slow adopter of cloud technologies for reasons such as decentralized data management, data quality issues, lack of digital skills, technical debt, and many more. But that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. The energy sector is slowly and steadily embracing the cloud, whether private, public, or hybrid, to keep up the ongoing digital disruption and leverage the many benefits of cloud computing. Data Dynamics worked with Fortune 50 oil and gas supermajors to migrate their 600 TBs of data into Azure. The customer had a massive network of data centers across the globe and was looking to streamline their operations and reduce the data center management costs. With the latest advancements in cloud infrastructure opening gates for greater efficiencies, the customer rebuilt their IT strategy by partnering with Microsoft Azure as their cloud provider and Data Dynamics as their Migration Partner.
Here’s how Data Dynamics helped the customer accelerate their journey to the cloud while ensuring minimum risk and cost-saving worth billions.
About the customer
The customer is one of the world’s seven multinational oil and gas “supermajors“ Fortune 50 companies operating in more than 100 countries. The company’s core areas include exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas, refining, marketing, supply of hydrocarbons and petrochemicals, and more.
Business challenge faced
The customer was looking to rapidly reduce carbon footprint and drive cost improvements by consolidating their data centers located across the globe to the Cloud. The timing was critical for successfully migrating the data center to Azure. They needed minimal downtime, and any delays would cost them 10s of millions of dollars as leases would have to be renewed, with ongoing operating costs.
One of the data centers in America had 600 TBs of data that needed to be migrated in 60 days to close the data center in time. Every approach the customer tried failed due to performance, scale, loss of metadata/security, or complexity. The Data Dynamics team stepped in to accelerate the migration process effectively. There were 250+ volumes with a maximum migration window of 45 days.
To put it all in a nutshell, the customer was looking to:
- Reduce carbon footprint and costs associated with data centers
- Reduce migration time to save $10s of millions of dollars related to leases
- Migrate 600 TBs of data in 60 days to close the data centers within time
The Data Dynamics solution
We deployed a solution that was a blend of Azure NetApp Files and Data Dynamics’ StorageX for efficient data migration. StorageX is our leading unstructured data management solution that delivers policy-based data management with no vendor lock-in. After discovering the shares and data to be migrated, the solution was deployed, setting up the automation policies, monitoring status, and letting StorageX automated migrations do the rest of the work.
The flow of the implementation went like this:
- Identify a set of matching shares/exports to be moved and streamline moving them.
- Facilitate the transfer or migration of SMB/NFS source files across heterogeneous storage resources.
- Move an entire share or export to a new share or export.
- Enable automated access control security management for Security Identifiers (SIDs).
- Make changes to SIDs, remove orphaned SIDs, and preserve SIDs during file movement.
- Provide cutover Estimation estimates the time required to move the data. The customer uses the estimate to decide when to “cutover” when you stop sharing the source and redirect users to the file data in the new location.
Business impact delivered
- 600 TBs of data migrated in 20 days into Azure
- File migration to ANF Ultra
- File Tiering with ANF Ultra and Standard
- 15X Improved Productivity
- 75% Reduced Project Costs
- Acknowledged savings of $10 million from the closure of data centers ahead of schedule
- Enhanced data protection with automatic provisioning of file system security at the destination
Click here to check out how Data Dynamics utilized the Azure File Migration Program to help one of the world’s seven multinational energy “supermajors” Fortune 50 companies accelerate its net zero emission goals while driving digital transformation.
Did you know?
Data Dynamics recently partnered with Microsoft to accelerate cloud adoption with Azure File Migration Program – zero license cost migrations into Azure!
Companies looking to accelerate their digital cloud transformation need a simple, accurate, and repeatable way to move their data into Azure. Microsoft has made this journey easier by creating the Azure File Migration Program. Azure is sponsoring the use of Data Dynamics’ StorageX Migrations to migrate data into Azure. StorageX is Data Dynamics’ award-wining unstructured data management solution that delivers policy-based data management with no vendor lock-in. It uses an automated, scalable, and policy-based engine to ensure intelligent and swift petabyte-scale migrations into Azure at ZERO license cost. It comes with robust security features such as automated access control and file security management. Organizations can now migrate their unstructured files, Hadoop, and object storage data into Azure at zero additional cost to the customer and no separate migration licensing. Customers can start the migration process with three simple steps. For more information about how Data Dynamics can assist you in achieving your data migration and management goals, please get in touch with us at azure@datdyn.com or click here to book a meeting.
