Challenge

Our customer is a commodities exchange that considers technology as core for its functioning. The company had over 100 instances across two public clouds. Over time, its usage plateaued but it started receiving wildly fluctuating bills from its cloud service providers. The bill shock caused by the X to 3X variance in monthly charges posed a severe strain on the company’s financial governance. This forced the exchange to look for an alternative platform.

Solution

Enter Unique Solutions. We took stock of the customer’s computing landscape and developed a blueprint to repatriate its workloads to private cloud with a minimum of 25% savings in monthly fees with equivalent or better functionality compared to public cloud platforms. Our solution comprised industry leading server, storage, networking, virtualization and other building blocks delivered via HPE GreenLake cloud hosted by the customer at its datacenter.

We established a cross-functional team to implement the solution. The team comprised personnel from HPE and the other OEMs, Unique Solutions, and the customer organization. HPE and the other OEMs were responsible for supplying their respective products that formed a part of the solution. Unique Solutions’ engineers installed the equipment, deployed the virtualization platform and carried out the migration from public cloud to HPE GreenLake cloud. The customer ensured site readiness, facilitated our access to the public cloud environment, and fulfilled the prerequisites of the migration process.

The key step in the repatriation was the migration of workloads from the public cloud to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. We created a mirror of the applications and data on the public cloud, restored it to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, and handed over the applications to the customer for testing. To ensure that the applications and data were synchronized between the public cloud and HPE GreenLake cloud at the point of cutover, we worked out a business downtime schedule. High quality of documentation helped ensure that we did not have to start from scratch or seek too much business downtime while migrating an application.

Any large and complex project faces many challenges. This was no exception. Many existing applications on the public cloud had interdependencies with one another, so they could not be migrated individually. However, migrating them as a cluster caused bandwidth challenges on the connectivity link used between the public cloud and HPE GreenLake cloud environment. We worked with the customer to enable the required configuration for completing the migration.

With multiple stakeholders and a plethora of moving parts, this engagement required excellent program management skills. Belonging to a relatively new field, this cloud repatriation project called for dedicated support from OEMs. HPE being the principal OEM in this project, it helped that Unique Solutions has strong leadership connects in HPE as a top tier Platinum Partner.

Outcome

After going live on HPE GreenLake cloud, the customer has cut its monthly bills by 25%. It incurs fixed monthly fees and has thus escaped bill shocks. The company has also gained the ability to spin up more instances without forking out any additional costs. In addition, it will find it easier to comply with data sovereignty regulations.

Going forward the exchange looks forward to enjoying the unique ability provided by HPE GreenLake to pick and choose the latest and state-of-the-art infrastructure components, something that is outside the buyer’s control on public cloud platforms. It can also add infrastructure by making incremental changes to the GreenLake master services agreement.

Encouraged by the results of this engagement, the customer is exploring the repatriation of more workloads from public clouds to HPE GreenLake cloud.