After shifting its IT infrastructure from its Berlin data center that was handled by Interoute to a new London data center, YouGov, a research company will save at least £100,000 a year. The organizations have saved momentous sums by switching to its own data center told by the director of global systems operations at YouGov, Nicholas Carter. He added that the cost savings come from the added capacity that they wanted to add.
They would have had to pay an extra £10,000 to £20,000 if not more, if they were trying to execute the current system in their recent environment. Moreover, they would have had to pay £3,000 to £4,000 each month to host it, he said. To shift its core IT infrastructure, the company used Backup 5 a virtual infrastructure and data protection provider Veeam Software’s backup and replication tool.
After having several issues with its data center in Berlin, it finally made a move. Carter explained that they had a managed service located in Berlin, YouGov owned the hardware, however the hardware was handled by data center provider Interoute and they had a lot of problems with this matter. They had the necessary skillset with the IT team in London, so they planned to move their data center there.
As YouGov had built its own data center, purchasing all the needed hardware itself the migration process took place. Carter said that they used Veeam to do a lot of the composite migration, the physical system was incomparable. They had NetApp in Berlin and they had a Dell Compellent Storage Array in London that made it hard transferring data all over, this is why they virtualized their environments and utilized Veeam to move the data.
From the end of May to July 28 this year, YouGov shifted about 30TB of data from Berlin to London. Carter added that a single virtual machine took only 8 to 9 hours to duplicate and with the use of Veeam they replicated 40 of those machines. YouGov were also able to transfer its applications like Symantec Enterprise Vault and Microsoft SharePoint towards the new infrastructure. YouGov picked Veeam to support it in transferring its IT infrastructure as it was looking into backup software for its virtual machines, because Veeam has the tool to do that, Carter said.
REFERENCES:
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2154005/yougov-save-gbp100-datacentre-migration
http://www.newzfor.me/0/381t
http://www.londonthenews.com/news/Computer+Industry/20120221/29843120/YouGov-to-save-£100-000-year-after.htm
http://www.computeach.co.uk/it-training-news-archive/february-2012
