Part 1 of this Series
Part 2 of this Series
But
nothing slows down, or completely paralyzes, a project like fear, uncertainty,
and doubt (FUD). With all of the migration horror stories about business
outages, cost runaway, and vendor lock-in; a healthy dose of FUD is warranted
when using traditional migration methods. After all, it's called paranoia only
if there isn't a reason to be worried.
But if
the migration project has already begun, even with the customer desiring all
these benefits, I commonly hear a variation of this irrational FUD statement:
"I can't introduce a new product into my migration because we have already
budgeted our funds nor can we allow the project to slip to the right any
further." Every time I hear this,
it reminds me of a response to that statement that I once heard an executive tell a
now-customer. It was something like this:
Part 2 of this Series
I cannot
recall a DoD or Fortune 500 customer in the last five years that has told me
they are not actively pursuing moving to the cloud or a new datacenter. Many
even have a strategy and perhaps even an architecture. But, when I ask them
"How do you plan to get there?", the response is often "I don't
know yet." Why? The reason is that while acquiring and leveraging
cloud-based resources have never been easier than before, the path to get to
the cloud is still fraught with roadblocks that insert great risk, elongate
project schedules, and overrun budgets; putting your mission, or business. This
means the cloud migration that was supposed to deliver great advantages, is now
an expensive ticking time bomb of risk. Will you make it before the timer
expires? Which do you cut first, the green or the red wire? I firmly believe
that Delphix eliminates the obstacles in your path keeping you from achieving
your cloud goals. I invite you to read this blog post about an application
migration project where I use Delphix to move a prevalent enterprise
application, BMC Remedy, to the cloud. At the conclusion of the article, you
will have a better understanding of how Delphix enables greater mission and
business success by enabling you to securely get your applications to the cloud
ahead of schedule and under budget, all while mitigating the risk of
failure.
If you are just jumping into this series, you can get
caught up by reading the two links at the top of the page.
Let's
start with a recap. in the first installment, I discussed the common and costly
constraints of complex enterprise application projects, namely ITSM, and
how we could apply Delphix to eliminate those constraints. The second
installment was more technical in nature and chronicled my experience in
virtualizing a new application (BMC Remedy) for the first time. At the end of
the second blog I realized the environment in my lab was not sufficient to run
multiple instances of Remedy and I needed to migrate my work to the cloud. I
decided to turn this to my advantage as a teaching moment. In this blog post, I
am going to discuss some of the common constraints with application migration
projects; how Delphix eliminates those constraints; and include a link to a
video of my cloud migration of Remedy, where I use Delphix to move my Remedy
installation from my lab to Amazon Web Services.
When I
reflect back on what kept my customers from successfully migrating their
applications, I see three main constraints.
Upside Down Plans
Your application migration plan likely
resembles something like this: Backup all application environments (AE), copy
all AE's to new facility, get non-prod application environments operational
(guinea pigs), stage new production, rehearse new production, validate new
production, backup old production, stage new production for final cutover,
cutover new production. That simple, right? Anyone who has been a part of
application modernization or migration projects knows that each step, even the
first one, can take months to complete; and some steps in there will have
multiple iterations (rehearsal and validation).
You are
spending, or planning on spending, a lot of time and resources to migrate your
applications to the cloud in order for your mission or business to reap the
agility, speed, and/or cost benefits that the cloud offers. Ironically, your
migration plan is likely to take you a huge step backwards. But, you realize
this and are willing to take the step, because you are hoping for two steps
forward afterward. Hope is not a strategy. Why not just move forward the whole
time?
With
Delphix, you can turn your application migration project right-side up. Place a
Delphix engine in your new location; Delphix is cloud-ready, so you can even
put it in AWS or AWS Gov Cloud. Delphix will make a non-disruptive copy,
compressed and filtered, of your production application and database in the new
location. Delphix will even work across
a slow WAN link. Going forward, Delphix will stay in near real-time sync with
your production applications and databases,
building a sort of time flow, providing you with a copy of your
production application in your new datacenter from virtually every point in
time after Delphix made that initial copy.
With
your production application data in Delphix, located in the new datacenter,
Delphix can now share the underlying data blocks across your non-prod
environments to create as many virtual
copies as you need. Instead of stopping work and backing up, then moving, all
of your non-prod environments, you can
hydrate all of your non-production environments with fresh virtual copies of
production in minutes. These copies are fully autonomous, read/write, and
consume a fraction of the storage (around 90% reduction). The virtual
applications feel and behave the exact same way, so there is no need for your
developers to have to change the way the application interacts with the database
or how they currently perform their development.
But, the
real power of how Delphix changes the process and economics of these projects
is with the self-services tools. Delphix gives your DBA's and developers the
ability, with a few clicks of a mouse, to perform fast refresh, rewind,
restore, archive, bookmark, and branching of their applications; and for it to
be completed in minutes.
Rational FUD
Delphix
allows you to increase your rehearsal and validation by 1000%, and allows you
to use fresh production data each time. No longer are you conducting rehearsal
and validation activities that run on weeks/months old data and takes minutes
to run and days/weeks to reset for another attempt. Provision a copy of your
production application to the rehearsal environment with a few clicks and in
minutes it's ready. Perform your validation activity. Something didn't go
right, or you want to tweak a setting and try again? Restore that application
to the pre-test state with a few clicks and it is ready for testing again in a
a few minutes. If validation was successful, or if you had some interesting
rehearsal results that you want to share with others/revisit at a later time,
just click "bookmark" and you have a complete copy of your
application environment that you can call on at any time in the future (and
produce within minutes).
Do you
need your non-production data to be masked? Delphix Agile masking can replace
all of the PII, PCI, or any other sensitive information in your production data
with realistic data (think randomized SSN's, etc) so that your developers can
test to ensure that their new query works to pull the details of the entire
fleet's personnel records, but without it being anyone's actual information.
And since Delphix can handle all of this automatically, developers no longer
wait for someone to scrub the new copy of production so they can have it, and
you no longer have to hope masking has actually been done. And all of this is
setup with a web browser without requiring specialized programming skill sets.
Once you
have successfully completed all validation activities and are ready for
cutover, you can have Delphix unvirtualize the AE. Delphix will create a full
copy of that AE on in your new production environment so you can complete any
final steps needed to complete cutover. Once new production is up and running,
you can have Delphix link to that environment and leverage the data from new
production for all of your downstream copies.
Would
your anxiety level go down and stakeholder confidence go up if you were able to
conduct 1000% more high-quality tests with fresh production data, without
adding a day to the schedule?
Dragging a Sled
I understand where you are coming from, I do. You and
your entire team are heads-down and working your hardest to drag this project
across the finish line. You have accepted that you won't get it there in time,
but you are working your hardest to ensure "the application sled" delivers your application as soon
as possible. But, I am offering you wheels and an engine, not a fancier sled.
Wheels and an engine turn your sled into a automobile. And, you will actually deliver your application on time and
under budget, with no losses along the way. You have to take time to now to
make the changes needed in order to speed up your projects. Putting on wheels
after you cross the finish line is pointless.
It
usually only takes a few days to get Delphix installed and operational in your
environment. Most of my customers begin
reaping the benefits of Delphix inside of a week. That means that in as few as
five days, your team can be resetting the rehearsal environments in minutes and
performing so many more tests, while considerably increasing the quality of
those tests. In five days you can be driving your application project, not
dragging it.
Real-Life Example
The
perfect example of Delphix addressing these three areas are exemplified in this
customer example. A fortune 500 consumer products company had undergone an
application modernization and migration project. In addition to changing to
Oracle Exadata hardware, the customer was also changing MSP's. That, in itself,
is a double-whammy. Not only are you migrating data centers, you are also
changing contracts and operations personnel. As you can imagine, this became a
political nightmare. Very quickly, milestones were being missed and costs were
escalating. It got so bad, that the company had come to the conclusion that the
only way to get the migration done was to plan for a weeklong outage and rent
forklifts to load their equipment into semi-trucks and drive them across
country to the new location! At about this time, Delphix entered into
discussions with the company. The customer purchased and implemented Delphix
into their migration project. The end results were astounding. The customer
eliminated the "Lift and Shift" of moving four out-of-five of their
non-production environments, and reduced their overall migration and ongoing operational costs by 80% for their
non-production environments. The customer finished their migration project
ahead of schedule, under budget, and had experienced zero downtime all the way
through cutover.
Below is
a link to my video where I actually move my BMC Remedy Installation into Amazon
cloud using the features I spelled out in this blog. The video is for the more
BMC Remedy-knowledgeable viewer, but it's basic concepts can be applied to your
enterprise applications.
