We wanted to do things at our own pace, but at the same time have experts available to guide us. That’s why we chose Devoteam G Cloud.
About the customer
One of the oldest nurseries in Singapore, Prince’s has 50 years experience in the industry. Started out humbly as a flower shop, Prince’s has evolved into a full-fledged landscape design and installation specialist.
The Challenge
When Prince’s Landscape was founded years ago, they used Microsoft-based technology for their infrastructure and ran three racks of servers in an on-prem data center. “Everything was on-prem, including our Active Directory server, databases, and application servers,” says Albert Junus, Chief Technology Officer of Prince’s Landscape.
Three years ago, when Junus joined the company, he found that much of the hardware was outdated, the server software near end-of-life, and extended support frequently unavailable. Two full-time engineers were dedicated just to keeping Prince’s Landscape’s IT operations functioning. “Each Monday, we would run various jobs, and they would tell me about that weekend’s failures. Every time I saw that email from the engineers, my heart skipped a beat because there were a couple times when we lost our main database. Luckily, we always had a backup we could plug in,” says Junus. “Still, we knew our on-prem days were numbered; we needed to move to the cloud.”
Prince’s Landscape’s IT team tried a lift and shift to migrate their virtual machines (VMs) over to the cloud.
The Goal
The Goal was to establish a leaner, more cost-effective organisation, with an agile workforce that could deliver more value to our customers.
The Solution
Devoteam G Cloud, a Google Cloud Premier Partner and three-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, worked with Google Cloud to design a hybrid migration path. Together, the team configured a VPN tunnel between the data center and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) so Prince’s Landscape could migrate its entire VMware environment to Google Cloud VMware Engine. This allowed an easy lift and shift of VMware-based applications to GCP without any major changes to apps, tools, or processes. “That gave me a lot of confidence when we were able to migrate all the VMs that we didn’t want to lose from the on-premises environment in less than a weekend,” says Junus.
Next, Devoteam G Cloud assisted with a complete infrastructure migration to Google Cloud’s PCI-compliant cloud native environment. The phased deployment started with the Active Directory migration, then HR and other application servers, and ended with the production environment migration.
The Methodology
Devoteam G Cloud uses Google Cloud Migrate to Virtual Machines to complete all VM migration activities. It is also recommended to migrate to Cloud SQL for improved security and stability. To understand all these possible alternatives, Devoteam G Clouds Cloud Architect’s consulted with Prince’s own IT team to design the architectural design.
The Result
As a result of Prince’s Landscape’s engagement with Devoteam G Cloud and Google Cloud, they were able to move from 4 VMs to just two instances in one Active Directory (AD) group. “That’s one of the biggest changes; we could move multiple VMs for primary and secondary AD backups to a single cloud AD.”
Also, Prince’s Landscape can now restore its production database in minutes running an automatic script whereas it used to take two engineers a full day to restore it manually in a data center. “Because our production and backup servers are both on GCP, we can just run the script in a few minutes, as opposed to 24 hours of on-prem work,” says Junus. “We’re down a couple IT people, but we’re able to make do with one outsourced IT partner because we don’t have as much to do to maintain our infrastructure.”
In terms of computing upgrade cycles, moving from a Microsoft-based on-prem environment to GCP has fast-forwarded Prince’s Landscape’s tech stack by over a decade. “We were able to leapfrog generations of technology,” says Junus.
Overall, Devoteam G Cloud helped Prince’s Landscape to:
Migrate 5 TB of database and server data from on-prem to GCP
Reduce 4 VMs to two instances in one cloud Active Directory
Reduce infrastructure staff from two engineers to one IT support coordinator.
Devoteam G Cloud continues to provide Prince’s Landscape with ongoing technical support through their Centre of Excellence in Poland.
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