Our specialist team helped a leading financial institution upgrade their data center infrastructure to Cisco ACI – removing technology debt, enhancing agility and achieving a seamless migration with zero downtime.
3 data centers successfully migrated
No outages
The Company
Our client is a world-renowned global bank and asset management group with 9,000 employees across the globe and over $1bn in revenue.
Today, the company provides specialized knowledge to assist individuals, businesses or intermediaries representing clients in their growth.
The challenges
Our client wanted to refresh their end-of-life data centre infrastructure. They decided to take the opportunity to upgrade to new technology in the form of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), with three core goals in mind:
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To upgrade and migrate services to three key data centres.
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To remove their technology debt and the risk associated with it.
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To implement new technology that would boost agility, enabling their IT teams to deliver new services to their internal and external customers.
They had a fundamental challenge: the technology from the vendor was newly released with little user adoption in the market and the customer’s in-house expertise was limited.
To achieve their goals, they needed technical specialists to help support the design and testing of the new infrastructure, and then support the implementation and migrations – and that’s where HighPoint came in.
The solution
This was an extremely complex transformation project that required strong program governance: helping the organization build the initial rules of engagement, identify objectives and business outcomes against which the success of project would be measured, and gain a deep level understanding of the processes which would need to be adhered to (such as change management, acceptance into run criteria and decommission activities).
With a team of eight specialists, we brought expertise in program and change management, technical design and delivery, Nexus 9k, specialist data analytics, and thought and delivery leadership in Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).
We started by helping build a Reference Architecture design document, which was then used to build a Reference Architecture lab environment. We then carried out an automated discovery of the infrastructure to map and identify services for migration, with the information stored for utilization in an evergreen database.
Next, our team helped create a production design document. This was used to stage and build the infrastructure in HighPoint’s state of the art staging facility, ahead of being deployed to the final location for implementation prior to migrations.
In order to identify a migration strategy that would minimize risk and downtime to services, a joint migration workshop was carried out. HighPoint then supported the first 4 migration activities, which were designed to help upskill the operations team and support them through initial migrations. Ultimately, the goal was to enable the client’s inhouse team to carry out the remainder of the migrations in a self-sufficient manner.
