The city administration of this city with a population of 500,A city administration that governs a population of 500,000, was faced with the decision to renovate two outdated data centers or to replace the hardware. After a cloud assessment workshop with comdivision, they decided to opt for a hybrid cloud solution with VMware Cloud on AWS.
The city had two data centers, which were operated in a mirrored fashion for many applications. One of the two data centers required a general overhaul of its air conditioning and power supply.
"The blade chassis and storage systems we used were 3-5 years old, and we had to modernize the hardware and software to an SDDC architecture," said the IT manager, "but given the city's very tense financial situation, we knew this was only possible to a limited extent, as the air conditioning and energy supply also needed to be brought up to date."
Reinhard Partmann conducted the Cloud Assessment Workshop with the customer; in the Workshop, "we took stock of the infrastructure," Partmann reports, "and in addition to the hardware, which was sometimes no longer under support, we also found operating systems that were End Of Life!" It was also found that the security infrastructure was not capable of providing sufficient protection without microsegmentation and other modern technologies. The previous network design had only a few segments, and some of the desktop systems were located in the same segment as the server systems.
Various things were checked as part of a proof of concept:
· Is connection of the VMC on AWS environment with low latency possible?
· Is establishing a stretched network practicable?
· Can workloads be moved on the fly?
Is Re-IP possible via automation?
"After completing the proof of concept, we decided that the applications should, as far as possible, move to special security segments in the VMware Cloud on AWS environment," said the IT manager, "as far as a Re-IP was possible, of course."
Applications where Re-IP was not possible were moved to the existing segment, which then remained connected to the on-premises data center via Layer 2.
"We set up the VMware Cloud on AWS environment redundantly stretched over two Availability Zones," reports Partmann, "and to further ensure availability, we mirrored it in another VMware Cloud on AWS environment using SRM."
Finally, the IT manager was able to attest that the move had been carried out without major business interruptions and that the security concepts were also significantly improved. "We have been able to significantly improve reliability through the stretched environment with the SRM protection at another location," he said, and finally remarked, "we were able to significantly reduce the investments, since there was no need for a complex data center renovation and the investment in hardware and software was replaced with a consumption solution using VMware Cloud on AWS."
