Summary:
With its long-established mission to always deliver on time, this company knew that they must maintain a zealous commitment to innovation and have a robust and resilient IT environment that supports its dynamic business.

Challenge:

To keep pace with its large-scale, dynamic IT demands, the firm recently came to DXC to develop a plan, timeline and budget to migrate their key systems out of their freight data center. They established an aggressive timeline so that the migration would be completed before the expiration of an expensive mainframe support contract and in time to not interfere with their annual peak period (ahead of the holiday season). Based on their previous experience working together, the team at DXC immediately knew they’d need to partner with TDS.

The mainframe refresh would save the company millions, but, in an industry where delayed deployments or outages can devastate a company’s bottom line, it was critical to also have a migration plan that would avoid peak times or cause disruption to end customers.

Solution:

TDS’ TransitionManager™ platform had proven to be invaluable with previous DXC work with Chevron, Toyota, Aon, JM Family, and others. It produces a single source of truth for all assets and provides a powerful planning, workstream and automation platform to support a highly efficient, low risk execution.

The team also knew the TransitionManager software would gain the confidence of the IT team and business units during both sales pursuit and execution. Together, TDS and DXC began to work with the customer in 2018.

Discovery:

For the customer, the discovery process began with aggregation of the data across their IT environment. It was critical to establish a holistic understanding of their environment of applications, assets and interdependencies which is critical in developing an effective IT transition plan.

As with any data aggregation initiative, a successful discovery phase consolidates information from multiple available sources of information. The information was normalized, validated and transformed into the central TransitionManager platform, to provide an actionable “vault of truth” and allow for predictable change management.

Analysis and Planning:

The next step was to analyze the key data and relationships to understand how the dependencies interact. The TDS team examined the Customer’s data center included applications, compute, storage, databases and network environment. To complete the initial data collected through auto-discovery tools, TDS conducted interviews with application owners/subject matter experts (SMEs).

This important step filled in gaps of information and further contextualized the data, including:

1. How each asset is used as part of the business process today
2. How servers, applications or other infrastructure are interdependent
3. Whether they are latency-sensitive and must move along with the mainframe
4. How applications could be bundled together for an efficient and low-risk
migration
5. The impact of a higher than expected number of remnant servers

The Migration Roadmap

DXC and TDS then guided the customer team through the different options for migration methods and target infrastructure. A strategy was built to address the unique organizational goals and challenges and established the migration methods to be used for the project. This process produced a clear roadmap including:

• Key Requirements and Constraints
• Migration Methods Pros, Cons, Architecture
• Recommendations for Public Cloud migrations
• Recommendations for co-location and on-premises data center migrations
• Move Groups and Assign Application Disposition
• 7 Move Groups
• 435 Applications
  • 9% Cloud*
  • 23% CoLo*
  • 68% Customer Data Center
• Reconciliation and disposition of nearly 2700 servers
• Recommendations for immediate actions to enable successful migration of latency sensitive mainframe applications – a low risk solution which had eluded the customer for years.

The Results:

The results provided the organization with an actionable roadmap to move forward which reflects their strategy, cost, risk, and benefits and desired business outcomes.