Overview

Al Dahra is a global agribusiness with a large and complex IT system that relied on Nutanix hyperconverged storage hosted in a third-party data center. It was told it had just 1 month to move its workloads from the data center it was using. It built a close-knit team with AWS Partner Zero&One and managed to move out of the data center in just 25 days. Nutanix, and the 40 terabytes of data it relied on, were crucial to support Al Dahra’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) systems. Despite the tough deadline, the migration was successful and is already reaping 50 percent cost savings and performance improvements for business users.

Just a Month to Migrate Vital Systems to AWS

Al Dahra already had some systems running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and managed by AWS Partner Zero&One. But it was given just 1-month’s notice to exit a crucial data center. That data center hosted its converged storage system Nutanix, which underpinned core enterprise resource planning and business intelligence systems. “Moving even one simple workload would normally take at least 2–3 months,” says Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT manager at Al Dahra. “Moving big and crucial systems so fast was a nightmare and I wasn’t sure we’d be able to do it. We did not have room for any mistakes or surprises.”

There had been complaints from business users that the ERP and BI applications were not performing to meet the business’s needs. Moving large quantities of data across the world slowed response times: some BI queries took up to 4 hours to be answered and some ERP transactions could take up to 10 minutes. Even though Zero&One was looking after AWS systems, Al Dahra’s team still had to keep an eye on operations while also running its own Nutanix on-premises infrastructure.

In total, the team had 40 TB of data to move. The team decided to take the opportunity to reduce latency and accelerate performance of its BI systems by centralizing workloads to run in the local United Arab Emirates (UAE) AWS center. The team also wanted to take the opportunity offered by the migration to the cloud to strengthen its security posture.

Rapid Migration, Centralization, and Stronger Security

Al Dahra and Zero&One took advantage of the AWS Program Migration Acceleration (MAP) for the tools to plan and prepare for the migration and to help reduce risks. The MAP also helped provide transparency over likely short-term spikes in costs during the migration. Given the short timescales, there wasn’t always time for normal testing to be done. Mr. Hoda offers some key advice for businesses facing a similar deadline. “First of all, don’t panic—you need to stay calm and keep your team calm,” he says. “You need a good team and committed partners. Then you just need to plan very carefully. If you have those things in place, then the actual implementation should be quite simple.”

The migration was done in three phases, with core applications moving first. After the first stage went smoothly—data was migrated over 1 week and the applications were cut over in just 1 day—the team had more confidence in migrating the remaining systems. After the data center was cleared, the team moved its other global instances. Mr. Hoda had confidence in the Zero&One team, having worked with them for some years. “I knew they had the technical knowledge of our environment,” says Mr. Hoda. “But also that they would stand with us and go all out for the deadline. And they needed to because we worked 24/7 to get this done.”

It was the first Nutanix Cloud Clusters migration to AWS in the region and both Nutanix and AWS provided direct support. All Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running in the US and Italy were migrated to the UAE and systems built around AWS Transit Gateway . This enables Al Dahra to make changes once and then promulgate these to every Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. The team also improved security with a Palo Alto firewall procured through the Marketplace AWS . The close working relationship between Al Dahra and Zero&One helped them to comfortably exit the data center with days to spare.

Migration Achieved With 5 Days to Spare, 50% Cut in Cloud Costs, 12x Faster ERP

All applications were successfully migrated from the data center 5 days before shutdown. The migration is saving Al Dahra 50 percent of its previous hosting expenditure. Performance has improved considerably: BI responses are returned in 4 minutes rather than 4 hours, providing near real-time visibility of business performance. ERP systems have seen similar performance improvements—complex queries that took 10 minutes are now completed in 30 seconds.

Disk throughput for the ERP application has increased from 400 MBps to 5,000 MBps. In addition to reduced latency, there are also savings in cost and management time that come from having things in one region.

As important as financial savings are, the reduction in maintenance overhead is another benefit of the project. Previously, maintenance tasks consumed up to 2 hours a day. Now Al Dahra has good insight into the business using just a single dashboard and can handle all maintenance and administration tasks in just 20 minutes.