The Challenge
This company is one of the largest US banks with 755 branches and multiple financial products. Such a large organization needs an efficient, scalable computing platform. At the time, they were managing their workload with an older version of Sybase on AIX. This required constant management with a dedicated in house data center, and infrastructure team. Updates, patches, and hardware overhauls were becoming costly and time consuming. The company recognized that a cloud platform could increase their team’s productivity and better support the high demands of the financial services business. After careful consideration, they decided to upgrade to the latest version of Sybase (ASE 16) and migrate from AIX to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The Approach
The organization set about researching its alternatives. It determined that a remote DBA and database managed service provider could not only deliver the services they needed, it could potentially save them much of the cost and frustration related to hiring in-house. Additionally, MSP’s also perform one-off valuable services like emergency assistance, “lift and shift” to the cloud, security assessments, and even database migrations.
The Solution
With such a large-scale critical workload to migrate, fidelity and security were key considerations. The company’s team knew a Sybase expert would help ensure a smooth transition. They selected Spinnaker Support for this role. Spinnaker’s database managed services team devised an IT strategy that increased high availability and implemented 2 DR plans. The challenge was maintaining mission-critical operations throughout the migration. AIX to AWS is not a one-to-one migration, and it was necessary to overcome several hurdles in the process. Because of their experience with Sybase and AWS, Spinnaker’s team smoothly navigated challenges for a successful implementation, and are now uniquely qualified to speak to the specific challenges presented.
The Results
Now that the workload has been migrated to AWS, the company has experienced increased performance and high availability that is more supportive of their 24/7 workload. Security and performance are also boosted, thanks to the scalability and continuous automatic updates. They enjoy ongoing cost savings as a result of automatic scaling, customer retention, and reduced in-house staff resources. They thrilled to be finished with time consuming hardware upgrades and manual software patching. With the new system, their personnel are free to focus energies to more strategic tasks.