Welcome » Case Studies » Alcomotive – Lift And Shift… And Fast…
AWS CASE STUDY
ALCOMOTIVE:
LIFT AND SHIFT... AND FAST...
The strategical decision was made to go all in on AWS.
150 servers hosting many different applications needed to move towards the AWS public cloud.
CUSTOMER:
Alcomotive
PROJECT:
LAUNCH DATE:
December, 2017
Customer Profile
Acomotive is a family-owned company based near Antwerp, in Belgium. Its origin dates back to 1937 when Albert Moorkens and his wife Constance set up a company in the production and and distribution of motorcycles. Today, Alcomotive employees over 2.000 employees spread in more than 19 countries in 6 Lines of Business (LOB) with different geographic footprint and scope. The areas in which Alcomotive is currently active are “Import and distribution”, “Parts”, “Building materials”, “Trading”, “Real Estate” & “Retail”.
The Challenge
- The customer contacted us for this migration end of August. They needed to be in AWS before Christmas.
- Some servers could not be reinstalled because software installation media were missing.
- Many SQL backend servers served different applications and development streets.
- Cut-over times had to be very limited.
“Cloudar understands as no other that customer experience is the next competitive battle ground where business is lost or won. Their superb expertise and knowledge of AWS facilitated a smooth and swift transition of our entire server landscape, both psychical and virtual, to AWS within time and budget and with minimal disruption. They have set realistic expectations from the beginning and did not only meet them but in my opinion they greatly exceeded them.”– STIJN STABEL, HEAD OF ARCHITECTURE AND INNOVATION, ALCOMOTIVE
Our Solution
The solution designed by Cloudar for Alcomotive was developed with High-Availability, Scalabality & Security in mind, all built up from a well-architected core:
- AWS Discovery Agent was used to create a full inventory and prepare the migration.
- Because many vm’s could not be reinstalled, we used DoubleTake (now Carbonite) Move to replicate to AWS. This creates an identical copy of the source server and limits cut-over time.
- Expensive Citrix Load Balancers were replaced by relatively inexpensive AWS ELB’s.
- VPC Peering was used to connect to an existing SAP CRM environment. A Direct Connect with VPN fallback was put in place to guarantee connectivity and reduce latency.
- The entire platform is fully managed 24/7 by Cloudar
We also made use of a number of AWS technical partner solutions:
- DoubleTake (now Carbonite) was used to replicate/migrate servers to AWS
- CloudCheckr© was used to ensure the setup complied with AWS best practices and to ensure ongoing compliance once the solution was in production.
- Site24x7© was used in conjunction with AWS CloudWatch to ensure optimal performance across all environments.
- Veeam N2WS was used to guarantee reliable backups and enabled us to create a solid disaster recovery plan for Alcomotive
The Result
- Making use of tools like Carbonite Move or CloudEndure greatly reduces cut-over times and seamlessly provides you with an identical copy of your source server without the hassles of AWS Export/Import service.
- After the time pressing Lift and Shift migration, we could shave a lot of money off the bill by optimizing the infrastructure for cloud
- The whole application landscape now runs faster, cheaper and much more reliable.
