It is March 2013 and Hess Corporation, an energy exploration and production (E&P) company, decides to divest its retail and energy marketing business.
Now, Hess IT has to quickly separate the necessary business systems and data for this new entity. To quickly prepare and deliver an operational infrastructure for the potential buyer to use, Hess IT partners with AWS (and with Nimbo, an AWS AdvancedConsulting Partner) in July 2013. They are to make the new IT environmentoperational by January 2014.
"We believe that AWS was instrumental in helping to materialize the concept of packaging the entire (new) organization up and handing it over to the buyer." - COO of Nimbo
For the quick and effective cloud migration, Hess IT prepares an inventory of all infrastructure/applications and their specifications that were to move out to the cloud.
For IaaS - Hess IT migrates approx. 300 Servers to AWS; stores almost 500 TB of data on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS); uses storage volumes with provisioned IOPS for low-latency performance/to configure RAID arrays; hosts in multiple Availability Zones for disaster recovery (DR); stores backups in Amazon S3 and uses Amazon Glacier for archiving; uses Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring cloud resources, and applications; uses virtual devices from AWS Marketplace to replace On-premises' NetScaler (load balancing) and F5 (application firewall) devices.
For the applications - almost half of the applications that are to move out to the cloud are custom-built (remaining half off-the-shelf type), and about 70 percent of them are web-based. Harnessing the power of the established DevOps practices at Nimbo, Hess IT experiments with creating applications quickly, and failing fast in order to build the new IT environment.
Further, Hess IT uses infrastructure as code to clone servers in the production environment very quickly. They also install Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, and required Virtual Appliances without usual procurement and licensing issues.
“This project was about speed to market and we completed the migration to the AWS Cloud in six months; it would have taken at least twice as long using physical servers.” - Lead Architect, Hess IT
Come January 2014, and the new production environment is ready which gets transitioned to the buyer in February 2014.
“The transition took place in a 30-minute meeting.” - Lead Architect, Hess IT
Eventually, Hess IT parts with the AWS based new IT environment that they have been working on for past 6 months, however, this endeavor leaves them with "raised visibility for cloud services".
“The impetus for this particular effort was provided by the divestiture —In the future, we will look to build cloud solutions as alternatives to our on-premises capabilities.” -Lead Architect, Hess IT
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------NB: Dates in the story are put in BOLD to underscore the speed with which the entire new environment could have been setup.
Further Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment