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HP’s extensive experience in outsourcing, application development, infrastructure services combined with rich domain experience in FMCG makes the company the ideal IT partner for Britannia’s initiative.
- One of the first IT initiatives undertaken at Britannia by HP involves a complex datacenter migration project.
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Brittania Leads Smooth, Seamless Migration with Minimum Service Outages for Best Outcomes
DataCenter Migration – Rigorous Discipline and Planning Make the Difference
This is the compelling story of how HP helped Britannia migrate all of its 35 mission critical servers to a hosted Data center 20KM away. The migration, amazingly, was completed in 24 hours flat, with minimum downtime and minimum disruptions to business.
Says Mr. V.V. Padmanabham, Corporate Manager, IS, Britannia, emphasizing the mission criticality of the project, “In our line of work, even a day’s loss of sale is not recoverable retrospectively. This would translate to less availability of products to sell to the distributors and would have a cascading effect in terms of actual sales. Keeping the downtime to the bare minimum, was then, one of the fundamental premises of any migration exercise undertaken.”
The Britannia and HP teams jointly made a concerted effort to get the planning and project management outline in place, to ensure the success of the project. Good project management methodology entails that objectives are defined and crystal clear, that there is a proper balancing of quality, scope, cost and time, that the plan adopted will meet the expectations of various stakeholders that right resources are identified and finally that the project will be executed per the plan.
“When we began the project,” says Mr.Padmanabham, “we challenged several of our own assumptions. Every hour was critical during the migration and hence each anticipated activity during the migration was broken into sub-activities. Our single success factor had to be the amazing amount of detailing and the efficiency of the planning exercise overall.”
What this meant for the team internally was that any downtime required for the execution, had be justified to stakeholders and also had to stay within the parameters of their expectations. The only way to achieve this was to demonstrate an enormous level of detailing for each and every activity that had to be performed towards the server migration. Further, each activity level was detailed with a defined owner, escalation levels and communication matrix at each milestone.
The detailing exercise was initiated by first devising an efficient project plan. The team pulled together a detailed Work Break-down Structure (WBS) of planned activities that encompassed a resolution of tasks with a duration of within 10 minutes. To gather the details that were woven into the WBS, the team first spent time conducting workshops with all the technical team members involved with managing the IT systems at Britannia.
Once the planning exercise was in place, the estimated downtime was discussed with relevant stake holders and their buy-in was obtained. At the end of the planning phase, the team also realized that the 2 day project (estimated) could be divided into 4 phases 1) Back-up, 2) Shutdown, packing and moving, 3) Reinstallation and finally 4) Testing and Go Live.
By the time the planning exercise was complete, the team had answers to difficult questions including – “What if the truck carrying our servers to the new destination met with an accident?” or “What if it starts to rain at the time of the DC migration?” Even the mover and packer staff had been briefed on being sensitive to time wastage and handled the backend with ease – dismantling servers, moving them, placing them, drawing cables – the entire exercise was smoothly orchestrated.
In great measure, the success of the project was due to the meticulous planning that preceded execution – over 20 working days went into planning the execution.
Resource Planning Ensures Minimal Hiccups During Execution, Exceeds Expectations
Now that the planning was in place, the next step was to plan the time and allocation of resources to take the migration forward. During the resource allocation it was important to keep in mind, that for the migration exercise to be successful, it had to be executed continuously. This meant that the IT team available within Britannia had to work continuously for an estimated 48 hours. This would have been practically impossible and the challenge was surmounted by augmenting the internal team with additional resources from HP.
The HP team working with the Britannia DC Migration team underwent a detailed induction well before the execution date to understand the technical details of the Britannia IT system. Apart from technical and operational detailing, the team also facilitated soft factors such as accommodation of the team in proximity to the DC premises.
To address the need of internally socializing the project, the team identified a communication manager whose only responsibility was to communicate the completion of mile stones to the senior management at Britannia and the HP team. This person was also assigned the responsibility of bringing to the team’s attention, any major deviations which could require senior management intervention.
The project, most importantly, exemplified team-work at its best. The large and diverse team consisted of IT engineers, facility and external workers including carpenters, electricians, cleaners, packers and movers. There was also the DataCenter hosting service provider teams at the new DataCenter.
It took an entire month for the project team to complete all these activities leading up to the actual movement of the DataCenter. Then came the actual execution of the plan.
Armed with a detailed WBS, the team went through the execution of the plan with clockwork precision and completed the process relatively easier than anticipated. In the end, the systems were released to production 1.30 hours prior to the allowed time schedule and deadline. There was absolutely no damage to equipment and zero hardware failures.
Says Mr. Padmanabham, “There were over 46 people who finally worked on this migration to make it successful and they were from different companies, ranging from project managers to packers and movers. HP took the lead in terms of overall program management and saw the transformation through successfully, despite the challenges presented by the nature of the hybrid environment with multiple stakeholders from different backgrounds.”
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Business Challenges
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Solution
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Benefits
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- An in-house DataCenter in operation which was not certified for compliance to industry standards.
- Servers being added continuously, multiple platforms, need for consolidation
- No prior experience in terms of DC migration
- Mission critical applications – no potential for extended downtime which would otherwise seriously hamper business
- Large extended team working on the project, different skill levels, backgrounds, IT knowledge
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- DC Migration and SAN Migration undertaken together to eliminate downtime recurrences
- The New DC organizes 35 servers optimally:
UNIX Servers
HPUX
WINTEL
HP SAN
Tape Libraries
N/W Components
· The New DC is a Level 3 DataCenter.
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- Smooth, seamless transition within 24 hours
- Improved response time to process transactions
- Network Design such that the communication between servers is optimal
- Increased mail speed
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