Many organizations are still in the process of migrating off-cloud (on-premises) Content Suite solutions into the OpenText™ Cloud. If an organization has a very large deployment with multiple instances, dozens of departments, terabytes of data and multiple custom applications integrated into Content Suite, this is not a situation that can be completed within a typical outage of a 48 to 72 hours weekend window.
In this blog post, we will discuss how OpenText Professional Services can overcome the challenges posed by even the largest environment migrations. This is a story that talks about one of the key success factors that allowed the team to complete a customer upgrade and off-cloud to cloud migration project that involved:
- 20,000 users over 75 business divisions
- 29 custom application integrations
- 3 cloud environments
- 85TB of replicated data
One of the core aspects to any migration to cloud involves dealing with the migration of the database and related storage of files. For a large environment this may require physical transport to a new data center if the volume of data or security prevents transfer over the network.
Preparing the infrastructure and deploying the software in the destination also takes much longer for a larger environment. The “big bang” approach is also fraught with many risks if the plan does not go perfectly even if there was time to migrate within a weekend.
We have a proven approach to work around these challenges. While the database from the source system is being transferred and the destination environment is being prepared, all the changes in the state of an off-cloud environment can be tracked while it remains in use.
Once the data has been transferred from the backup and the cloud environment brought online, all the changes that occurred in the off-cloud system can be replicated over to the cloud system. This is referred to as the “delta” of the data between the off-cloud and the cloud system, or in other words, the difference. This allows for both environments to be up and running in parallel until teams are ready to permanently cut over to the new cloud system.
This approach has many advantages including:
- More time to test the cloud solution before going live
- Easier to back-out and return to the off-cloud environment
- Reduces risk of large migration failures and strain on resources
- Drastically reduces the outage window to production.
Rather than having the production system go offline for an entire weekend or even a whole week, which is probably not even remotely feasible for a large system, the process can reduce that outage to as little as a few hours.
For this particular project a team was assembled on-site and remotely, working together throughout an entire weekend and into the late hours performing validations and remediation. There was one issue faced that was not expected, so the team collaborated in real-time to plan, test the solution and implement within a very tight timeline and was successful. This resulted in several thousand missing documents to be transferred to the cloud system and prevented several dozen users from being locked out of the system the next day.
OpenText’s Proven Advantage
The solution that allows for this type of delta replication of data, is complex and requires deep expertise from OpenText to ensure it is deployed to meet all of an organization’s needs. The OpenText Professional Services team bring together multiple specialized Consulting Practices from the Architecture, Content and Cloud teams that work tightly together during the entire process.
This solution is the critical piece in the migration and without proven expertise and software, a migration of a large size with minimal to no outage is simply not possible.
OpenText™ Professional Services has vast experience in helping customers to migrate their OpenText products hosted off-cloud to cloud. Learn more.
Author: Shawn Fogarty – Lead Consultant – Professional Services. Shawn has 10+ years experience supporting OpenText Content Suite products and implementing solutions for clients. He has also delivered numerous training sessions for internal employees and is a trusted advisor.
