The DWP realized that its transformation needed to happen in two stages. First, it needed to regain control of its IT estate from the third-party providers that had been supporting its systems for several years. Second, it needed to re-engineer its IT management processes and train its internal team to drive change—an initiative known internally as “World Class Service.”
As a first step, the DWP team decided to engage IBM® Consulting to establish a new hybrid cloud architecture that would enable the DWP to host its most critical systems and sensitive data in a security-rich private cloud environment, while also taking advantage of public cloud services where appropriate to increase agility and cost-efficiency.
Making use of facilities provided by Crown Hosting Services, the DWP and IBM team built and provisioned two new, state-of-the-art data centers, linked to the DWP’s existing data centers and fully tested to ensure high availability and resilience. The new infrastructure is fully virtualized and configured as a private cloud, providing much greater flexibility than the previous model, which mainly ran applications on separate physical servers.
With the infrastructure in place, the team began migrating the DWP’s critical applications over to the new data centers, using IBM’s tested and demonstrable data center migration method. Larger and more complex sets of applications were migrated in a series of waves, while smaller, less critical or lower risk applications were moved one by one using a conveyor approach.
The team took the unique needs of each system into account against the challenging timescales, virtualizing, redeploying, remediating or replacing applications as appropriate to improve performance and stability while reducing infrastructure costs.
The team delivered the migration plan at a rapid pace over ten months, moving a total of more than 60 applications onto 1,500 virtual servers. With a highly scalable private cloud architecture supported by four petabytes of storage, the new data centers now have the capacity to support the DWP’s workloads for years to come.