The Challenge

As this IoT provider’s business continued to grow, the company faced a problem due to its success. The volume of data that required tape backup in the data center was increasing exponentially.

Traditionally, the company employed a backup and archival tape solution from an industry leader in data backup and recovery applications. As the company’s volume of data continued to grow, the existing architecture required near continuous tape backups to multiple storage arrays. Backing up to physical media in a data center required a lot of manual effort, lacked on-demand scalability, and was costly for the IoT provider.

The company also wanted to minimize its data center footprint, improve efficiency and reduce operating costs by moving these resources to the AWS Cloud. The data center migration would allow the company to capitalize on the advantages of cloud computing, including access to a flexible, highly scalable and reliable AWS service model and service offerings. It planned to eventually eliminate its data center presence for the backup solution once its migration to the AWS Cloud was complete. To accomplish this goal, the company needed to move terabytes of data stored in its data center to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 is an object storage platform with the ability to store virtually unlimited amounts of data into the cloud.

The project would require three primary efforts:

1. Remove the stored backup data from the IoT provider’s data center.
2. Migrate the company’s data to the AWS Cloud platform.
3. Implement a cloud-based architecture for backup and storage of company data going forward.

Moreover, it was critical that the project be implemented with minimal disruption to their current business operations. Additionally, the customer did not want to incur incremental operating costs, and it was imperative for the migration to be performed and completed quickly.

The IoT provider realized that, to migrate an extensive store of critical data to the AWS Cloud with minimal disruption to its business, it needed strong storage and an experienced AWS Cloud consulting partner. So, the company engaged Cloud Migration Services from Hitachi Vantara to address the challenge and help achieve these goals in a timely manner.

The Solution

An AWS Premier Partner with Migration Competency, Hitachi Vantara designed a solution leveraging cost-saving technologies and project management expertise that was delivered on time and under budget (see Figure 1). The solution engineers employed AWS Snowball to move the the IoT provider’s data from its company data centers to an Amazon S3 bucket to the AWS Cloud.

AWS Snowball is a terabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS. AWS Snowball addresses many common challenges in executing large-scale data transfers, including high network costs, long transfer times, and data security concerns.

Transferring data with AWS Snowball was very effective in moving critical data securely to the cloud and all at a cost approximately one-fifth that of high-speed internet data transfer alternatives. The data migration solution employed the latest cloud-based features of Commvault technology for backup and restore after the migration. The solution engineers configured Commvault to directly work with both AWS Snowball and Amazon S3, providing for a seamless transfer of critical data with minimal downtime for the IoT provider. Furthermore, the data migration solution eliminated the need for the company to directly manage its local storage. The Cloud Migration Services solution has proven to be highly scalable, while providing greater flexibility at significantly lower operational costs.

Benefits From the Migration to AWS

The IoT provider has realized many advantages the AWS Cloud offers. The AWS infrastructure is highly scalable and the company has access to unlimited and on-demand storage. The solution is more efficient as it enables the company to operate at significant cost savings.

The IoT provider has also benefited from automation and realizes seamless and continuous backups, which are paramount to their daily business operations. The company’s business continues to grow while the flexibility of the migration design and the AWS Cloud helps them do so seamlessly and efficiently.