Services/ Data center migration

Managing data center migration

HSBC India used PlateSpin Migrate from Novell to migrate whole workloads to new hardware across a wide area network, writes Nivedan Prakash

HSBC India is headquartered in Mumbai with branches in all the major cities. The bank operates successful retail and commercial banking, insurance and investment businesses, and provides services to other members of the global HSBC group.

Business concerns

For historical reasons, many of HSBC India’s core banking applications were running in a data centre near the corporate headquarters in Mumbai, at the heart of the city’s financial district. Office space in this prime location comes at a premium, and the bank realized that maintaining this data centre was a significant cost to the business.

“Moving to a robust, world-class facility was also an opportunity to consolidate physical servers through virtualization, thereby reducing hardware costs and increasing flexibility,” said Rishi Gupta, Vice President of Data Center and Server Services, HSBC India.

The bank selected a hosting provider operating from a data center in another city, around 387 miles from Mumbai. The challenge was to find a practical way to perform a migration across this distance without risking the loss of vital data or significantly disrupting business operations.

Banking on a solution

HSBC India initially considered physically moving the existing servers across the country. Moreover, the bank’s team also looked at the possibility of rebuilding the environments from scratch on new hardware.

“After detailed analysis, neither option seemed viable. Transporting the servers would have taken too long, and the risk of damaging something in transit was too high. On the other hand, rebuilding our heavily customized applications would have been too complex and expensive. We, therefore, needed a third option,” asserted Gupta.

HSBC India then started looking for an IT solution to manage the migration, and settled upon PlateSpin Migrate from Novell. Following a proof of concept delivered by Pentagon Systems and Services, a Novell Partner, the bank decided to purchase the solution. Pentagon demonstrated several migrations and trained the in-house team, enabling them to complete the project without external assistance.

PlateSpin Migrate ‘decouples’ workloads from underlying server hardware and streams them to new physical servers or virtual hosts across a local or wide area network connection. This enables the low-impact migration of servers with no need to worry about the complexities of physical transportation or the nature of the target system.

Gupta added that PlateSpin Migrate enabled them to take snapshots of their systems and move them across a 155 Mbps line to new hardware in the new facility, “We moved each server during weekends on a four-week cycle, preparing the target platform and then using PlateSpin Migrate to migrate the data. The whole migration was completed within six months, with no significant disruption to users.”

HSBC India also took advantage of the versatility of PlateSpin Migrate by moving 40 systems away from physical server hardware and into a virtualized environment.

“Using PlateSpin Migrate to virtualize physical server workloads has enabled considerable hardware consolidation. As a result we are saving money, increasing flexibility and reducing server management workload,” pointed out Gupta.

Fruitful results

“Without PlateSpin Migrate, it is hard to imagine how we could have performed this migration at all. The distance between the data centers would have been a massive obstacle for traditional migration methods, and we simply could not have moved the systems quickly and safely enough to meet the requirements of the business. The benefits that we will obtain from moving to a robust, world-class facility are significant,” said Gupta.

The new data center will allow HSBC India to repurpose its existing facility, which will lead into making better use of prime office space.

PlateSpin also helped the bank to take the first steps towards infrastructure virtualization.

“In the banking industry, the IT function must be able to support the business with total integrity and without interruption,” stated Gupta. “The ability of PlateSpin Migrate to help us meet these objectives throughout the course of a large-scale, long-distance migration project is extremely impressive.”

Above all, PlateSpin Migrate enabled HSBC India to keep its core applications running throughout the migration, and enabled the bank to switch to the new data center with no loss of business data and no disruption to IT services during standard working hours.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com