The Customer
Telarix is a provider of business-to-business and OSS/BSS management solutions to improve efficiency and productivity. Through software and services, Telarix empowers over 4,000 communication companies worldwide with superior levels of visibility and control over their entire voice, video, data, and SMS business.
The Opportunity
Telarix wanted to increase their productivity by moving their Quality Assurance and Development servers to a reliable and redundant environment. They wanted this environment to be easily accessed by the stakeholders and project owners (QA and Dev teams). It was essential for this environment to be flexible so Telarix’s IT team could easily manage and scale their compute and storage resources as needed. A reliable environment would increase their productivity as well as the quality of their work.
Telarix’s IT team desired a better oversight of what IT resources and assets were being used in terms of patching, security, maintenance, monitoring, and more. A reliable, available, and scalable environment with zero down time was the desired end result.
The Solutions
Telarix began with their SQL Server and .NET applications in an onpremises database with two data centers. Telarix’s primary issue was that they couldn’t scale their IT resources up or down based on their needs, which resulted in a fixed asset cost and limited their productivity. With dbSeer’s consultation, Telarix made the executive decision to migrate their SQL Server and .NET applications to the AWS cloud to increase their productivity and work quality.
dbSeer used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers – giving them complete control of the computing resources. There is total visibility on what resources are (and aren’t) being used so that Telarix’s IT team can easily scale to fit their needs. With Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows, Telarix only pays for the capacity it uses. Amazon EC2 is also incredibly reliable – replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service is run with Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and data centers with 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.
As an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, dbSeer partnered with AWS and was able to secure funding for the project, which off-set much of Telarix’s costs. dbSeer put together a team for the migration and followed the methodology on the following page.
AWS accounted for approximately 51.7% of total Windows instances in public cloud IaaS during 2017
Methodology
- Discovery Phase
- During the Discovery phase, we study the customer’s environment and evaluate what AWS services could be used to complete the migration. For Telarix’s migration, we concluded that the best option would be Back-up and Restore due to the nature of their environment. Their architecture included a multiserver application and the specifics of their case made it so that the Database Migration Service and Schema Conversion Tool couldn’t completely support the migration.
- Planning Phase
- In the Planning phase, we completed budgetary, capacity, and migration planning. This included mapping the exact equivalent of the computing power for each server, calculating the proper IO through-put, calculating the storage capacity for each server, and planning the proper back-up strategy. Telarix communicated their deadline for the project and we broke the migration into four two-week sprints. We also reviewed redundancy and high availability options with Telarix and received their approval for the network and architecture design of their AWS platform.
- Agile Delivery
- We executed the plan in the agile delivery phase. The delivery phase was broken into four two-week sprints with regularly scheduled stand-ups. We evaluated risks and blockers associated with the Telarix migration and addressed them in a timely manner. After the migration was completed, we ran testing to confirm that the servers were running properly and resynchronized the data.
- Project Closure
- After conducting a robust security review, we received the client sign-off, decommissioned the old system, and enabled the new system. The last steps included a documentation review and finally the hand-off.
The Results
In total, dbSeer successfully migrated all planned servers and advised Telarix on the remaining server migrations. These migrations were completed within two months, broken up into four two-week sprints.
