About Atos Origin
Atos Origin is one of the world's largest IT services providers, with 50,000 employees across 40 countries. In the Netherlands, the company employs approximately 8,000 people and operates several data centres—providing a wide range of services to some of Europe's largest companies.
"Our customers are asking for professional solutions around how to manage their business continuity and information security: the Novell PlateSpin® products deliver the perfect fit, to support Atos Origin's approach in "Professional Migration and Virtualisation Services", said Rene Baas, Senior Vice President Global Sales and Portfoliomanagement Managed Operations Atos Origin.
Challenge
In recent years, Atos Origin has seen significant growth in customer demand for help with infrastructure-related projects such as virtualisation, server consolidation, disaster recovery, and the migration of physical and/or virtual servers between locations of choice.
"These types of projects all involve the migration of applications and data from one environment to another—often to a different physical server in a different data centre," said Martin van Zoelen, Portfolio Manager for Professional Services at Atos Origin Netherlands. "This can be a complicated process, and our customers cannot tolerate downtime or loss of data. We needed to find a solution that could handle all the different types of migration project in a standardised, automated way—reducing cost and risk for our customers."
When a major customer in the financial services sector asked Atos Origin to assist in an emergency server migration project with very short deadlines, the company needed to find a solution fast.
Novell Solution
After looking at various server migration tools, Atos Origin decided to enter into a Europe-wide partnership with Novell, based on the PlateSpin product set.
"PlateSpin was the best solution we found that could offer truly multi-modal migration options: not just physical-to-virtual, but also physical-to-physical, virtual-to-virtual and even virtual-to-physical," said Van Zoelen. "This was exciting for us, because with a single product set, we would be able to meet the needs of almost any migration project. We quickly built a range of offerings in our standard services portfolio to enable our customers to take advantage of this new technology."
With PlateSpin workload migration products, the source server can remain online while data is incrementally replicated to the target server. Once the two servers are fully synchronised, the target server takes over as the production system, and the source can be shut down. The cutover itself can be completed in a matter of minutes, practically eliminating downtime and protecting against data loss.
"PlateSpin also delivers a very high level of automation, which simplifies the process of migration significantly," said van Zoelen. "We estimate that on average, PlateSpin saves approximately four hours of manual work per server. Our consultants can more or less set up a migration and leave it to run, instead of sitting by the machine and monitoring its progress. Naturally, this means that we can get through more migrations in less time - and deliver better value to our customers."
Results
"Our PlateSpin products proved their value almost immediately," said Joris Haverkort, Product Manager at Atos Origin Netherlands. "One of our customers—a major financial services company—needed to migrate its physical servers to a new data centre quickly, because its existing facility was suffering power supply problems. Using PlateSpin we were able to complete 61 migrations within the targeted migration windows, saving an average of 4 hours' migration time per server. Without PlateSpin, this would not have been possible—the deadline was simply too challenging for traditional migration methodologies to be successful."
Looking to the future, Atos Origin expects the PlateSpin software to deliver similar advantages for other projects in the future.
"PlateSpin offers the same level of performance and automation, whether you are aiming to consolidate hardware through virtualization, move workloads from one data centre to another, or perform almost any other type of migration," said Haverkort. "The flexibility of the software is a real advantage because our consultants can use the same tools to meet the needs of many different customer scenarios."
For Atos Origin's customers, the company's partnership with Novell will deliver rapid, low-risk migration services that offer excellent value for money.
"If we can save four hours' work per server, it naturally translates into lower costs for our customers," said Van Zoelen. "More important still, the standardised, reliable approach means that the risk of data loss and downtime is practically eliminated—giving customers confidence that their business-critical systems are safe. As a result, this partnership with Novell promises to deliver enormous value to us and to our customers, now and in the future."