Health Insurance Provider's Journey Through Customized Digital Transformation

The Situation
A health insurance provider increased infrastructure flexibility, the ability to leverage the cloud and cost reduction resulted in the strategic business decision to exit the secondary site for a colocation data center in Ashburn, VA.

The Challenge
Based on favorable lease terms, the consolidation & migration needed to be completed in a very aggressive four (4) month window. Our client estimated that 1,000 devices would be impacted which supported mainly development/test, QA, disaster recovery, email services, and some production data and applications. After performing an inventory in the Georgia facility Align found 3,571 physical devices would need to be migrated.

The Solution
To meet this challenging goal, the migration team worked closely with the client to develop a Current State to Future State transition. The team identified opportunities to leverage upgrades and technology refreshes, re-aligned the compute cluster and storage frame interdependencies, and designed and built the structured cabling of the data center.  The team also developed an 11-week migration plan, which included:

• All devices assigned to bundles
• All bundles scheduled on 9 specific waves
• Managed and documented detailed migration tasks using a T-8 runbook

• Wave Lead managed Command Center for each migration wave
• Disconnect Lead managed the disconnect team in Georgia for each migration wave
• Reconnect Lead managed the reconnect team in Ashburn for each migration wave
  
  

The Results
Align successfully migrated 3,571 devices from Georgia to Ashburn within a 4-month compressed timeline. The client now obtains…

• Strategic enablement for higher consumption of cloud services in alignment with IT goals
• Ability to consume a broader set of services beyond just co-lo/hosting activities
• Potential for additional operational savings through reduced rent, utility and specific local tax abatement incentives on infrastructure purchases
  
  

Some project key metrics

• 40% Reduction of the organization’s data center footprint
• Migrations of
• 3,570 devices
• 800+ applications
• 1,800+ physical servers
• 14,000 virtual servers
• 450 storage devices (SAN, NAS and Data Warehouse)
• 840+ network devices