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US Signal Case Study - Fast and Easy Migrations with Zerto

June 23, 2016
Data Migration, US Signal

Migration projects are lengthy and complicated, especially at scale. When US Signal had to migrate hundreds of VMs and 50 TB of data, they knew this would be an extensive project. Adding another layer of complexity, the customer they were migrating was adding terabytes of data on a daily basis. Due to this rapid rate of change, a significant outage was required to ensure the application would be synchronized when it came back online. The customer really could not tolerate this extended outage, so they had to find a better way. 

Zerto Virtual Replication with its continuous block-level replication ensures the applications are synchronized at the destination site. This dramatically reduced the outage required so end-user productivity was not impacted. The automated failover procedure ensured a
consistent and repeatable process so the applications were brought correctly and quickly.

The Problem

The team at US Signal was migrating one of their customer’s datacenter from Florida into their own datacenter in Michigan. They had hundreds of VMs to migrate and 60 TB of data to move. The VMs experienced a high rate of change, posing a serious challenge. Additionally, due to the size of the environment, the team didn’t think the migrations would complete in a timely manner. The expectation had been set that end-users would need to be locked out of the application for a set period of time, during the typical maintenance window. However, due to the size of the environment, the team wasn’t sure this would happen. The customer was really hoping to avoid any additional downtime beyond the current maintenance windows.

Zerto Virtual Replication: Easy, Easy Migrations

Zerto Virtual Replication was able to exceed the customer’s expectations with the migration. The replication mechanism was fast and got the applications quickly into synch, easily keeping up with the high rate of change. “We used the pre-seeding feature within Zerto (Virtual Replication) to try to accelerate the migration. In the short time that took, the customers already had 8 TB of new data that we needed to synch. This is where Zerto really shined. We were able to synch the sites to within just a few seconds of one another.” Adam Kessler, Director of Professional Services. Additionally, the customer was just amazed and how simply and easily the entire process executed. “The hardest thing to really communicate is the simplicity. Zerto (Virtual Replication) is just so easy to use. We thought we would have weeks of planning and require lots of people on hand to carry out the migration. We were literally failing over applications which consisted of 5 – 10 VMs and completing the migration in 10 minutes per application. This just doesn’t happen, unless you have Zerto.” Jim Schuyler, Professional Services Engineer. Another win for the US Signal team is, unbeknownst to them, a potential client was silently observing the migration process. They were so impressed they are now moving to US Signal’s cloud. The migration will consist of 635 VMs with up to 80 TB of data.

Summary

Zerto Virtual Replication delivers simple data mobility, revolutionizing datacenter migrations. The planning and execution of a datacenter migration can take months. With Zerto Virtual Replication, migrations can run in the background, replicating the data to the target site. The fully orchestrated failover process can be executed in minutes with virtually no downtime. Rapid migrations ensure IT is able to take advantage of new infrastructure, datacenters or IaaS delivered by cloud providers to accelerate ROI and the realization of all the benefits gained from these new IT assets.