Database Migration

Who:

CareFusion
3750 Torrey View Court
San Diego, CA 92130

When: November 2012

What: Client needed to replace its existing PolyServe database platform, which was approaching its end of life and support.

The Challenge: Client's business relies heavily on its back-end database infrastructure to run the hundreds of applications it supports.  A Microsoft SQL platform supports many of these applications, including critical software applications.  As a result, a project assessment and release strategy for full deployment and migration of all SQL databases hosted on the PolyServe platform was needed to migrate those databases to the new solution. This involved first building the new environment and then migrating 1000 SQL databases represented by 100 applications to it.  For an effective transition, many unknowns about the database environment which existed had to be discovered. This included creating a list of all databases and identifying the status of each to be migrated.     

The Solution: A decision was made to move the PolyServe platform to a virtual environment leveraging VMware.  Since the databases were spread across two separate geographically located data centers, new equipment was purchased and implemented at both locations. The new environments were designed with server farms at both locations.  A full inventory of all databases was completed, which was invaluable when prioritizing the migrations.  The migrations were deployed on a release basis with prior knowledge and coordination involving all business, application and database owners.  Release dates de-conflicted with other system deployments (e.g. SAP, etc.). 

The Result: Approximately 1000 databases representing 100 applications were migrated from the existing PolyServe environment to VMware.  The new platform provided greater redundancy and optimized performance.  Standardizing on the VMware virtual environment simplified the environment, provided modular operations, more efficient hardware use, reduced complexity provided license consolidation which cut costs.  A new database management system was also deployed which improved visibility for the database administrators when managing the environment.