Seamless data center deployment for leading healthcare company

Client Background:
A leading healthcare company, underwent a restructuring of its existing data center and required the migration of its data center to a new location.

Project Objective & Overview:
The client’s objective was to move their workload to a new location without disrupting the current infrastructure. To achieve this, a hardware design was prepared using the Cisco UCS unified computing platform. The customer had multiple customized applications with MS SQL and Oracle databases, categorized into infrastructure, CRM, and business applications. Among these, the business applications were deemed critical. The workload consisted of over 200 virtual machines, 15 databases, and more than 20 business-critical applications, along with 15 infrastructure management applications.

Softenger Contribution:
Softenger worked closely with the customer and a Tier 1 systems integrator (SI) to design a solution for the new data center build, considering future business demands and expansion. Our team handled infrastructure tasks such as hardware racking, stacking, compute and storage installation, and cluster formation, following best practices to ensure optimal performance for the applications. We also validated the hardware configuration with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for infrastructure benchmarking. The complete virtual infrastructure was migrated over the WAN using Hyper-V Replication, with log shipping for SQL synchronization, ensuring failover capability until the new data center was fully live. Additionally, we implemented a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution to address cybersecurity concerns while minimizing business impact.

Barriers, Challenges, or Points of Learning Identified:
One major barrier encountered during the project was storage performance, which became apparent during the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase. Our team successfully reformed the storage without any downtime by implementing easy tiering. Another challenge was integrating the applications with the new IP schema, as extending the same IP schema proved to be quite challenging.