Business Challenge

One of the world’s largest publishers of electronic content for a variety of sectors, including academia, libraries, automotive, and other industries, was running the database for its online customer-facing application on aging servers that had become unreliable, and whose platform was no longer supported by the database manufacturer.  Because of the technical concerns this was causing, the company needed to migrate their database as soon as possible.  And in order to minimize the disruption to their customers, they needed to complete the full migration within a 12-hour window.

Solution

First, Forsythe performed an assessment of the customer’s existing database environment in order to identify the appropriate configuration for the new environment, and to determine the best plan for migrating to the new platform that had been chosen.  Forsythe’s server practice worked with the manufacturer on an architecture design to support the customer’s vast database. 

The migration was conducted in several phases, during which Forsythe’s server practice worked closely with the customer’s system and storage administrators, as well as database administrators.  Forsythe advised them on how to deploy the database for optimal performance on their new platform.  This included addressing backup and recovery issues, providing adjustments to some queries, and guiding them past typical migration pitfalls. 

To enable the customer to continue work on several new, critical applications and enhancements that were being rolled out simultaneously, Forsythe migrated its development environment first.  Once this phase was completed, Forsythe conducted both the production environment migration and the quality assurance environment migration in three stages.  A first run-through validated the process to be followed.  A second measured how long the migration would take.  Based upon this second run-through, numerous refinements were made, shortening the process from 28 hours to within the permissible 12-hour window.  The third and actual migration was completed in less than 10 hours.

Results

The customer’s enormous database was up and running on the new platform within 3 ½ months of the initial discussion, and the live migration was completed successfully within a 12-hour window.