Scalable Migrations To Office 365, But At What Cost?

A lot of migration vendors talk about solution scalability while minimizing costs for the required migration infrastructure footprint, but here at Cloudficient because of our next generation cloud-native ReMAD platform we’ve got this covered from all angles.  Let’s take an example of what you’d need for a migration 15,000 users to Office 365 with 100 TB of Enterprise Vault archived mailbox data deployed three regional data centers.

Using older generation technology, you’d need quite a bit of on-premise hardware. For example, at an absolute minimum most likely the following would be required:

• SQL Server: 24 CPU Cores, 64 GB RAM - fast storage and licensing is required as well as all best-practice maintenance and backup schedules
• Migration Server: 8 CPU Cores, 16 GB RAM

And you would need that sort of equipment in each of the three data centers, depending on the solution you choose and your desired timescales.

Of course, this has a cost element, as the system requirements for these machines are moderate to high if you want the migration to operate at a reasonable speed. Even if a customer doesn’t purchase additional hardware, then virtual machines will need to be provisioned and these are reasonably high specification requests, which might impact line of business applications.

With Cloudficient what you would need is very different. Since our ReMAD Platform, which is our cloud-native ‘brain’ for our applications, resides in the cloud, the requirements for on-premise hardware are much reduced.

You would need the following for a comparable situation:

• Bridgehead server: 4 CPU Cores, 8 GB RAM

A minimum of just this one server, however, multiple endpoints could be deployed, and if that’s the case then we would likely recommend one bridgehead server in each datacenter – it’s a huge difference straight away in up-front costs!

But wait there’s more (couldn’t resist) – what if during the migration you have more bandwidth available than originally anticipated, or the capacity to get more archives migrating in parallel, or the business puts pressure on the project to finish the migration sooner? In these situations, with older generation solutions, you may struggle to ‘go faster’.  While older generation solutions might be able to make the migration go faster, it will be at an additional cost – you’d need more hardware. So, if the customer originally had some issues or delays in obtaining hardware for the project, and this extra requirement is placed in front of the project you’ll likely encounter the same sorts of issues and delays. In addition, even with extra migration server hardware, a bottleneck may still exist in the SQL Server implementation since there will database tables with hundreds of millions of rows.

With EVComplete and Onboarding 365 Complete, it’s a different story. Cloudficient’s ReMAD platform, the heart of all our offerings, powers our solutions to meet the needs of the largest organizations. In fact, it consists of cloud microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes clusters.  One of the great things about this is that it has the ability to scale very easily, in fact, it will scale automatically given the parameters our teams have implemented.

Furthermore, it will scale back when the additional project demands lessen. More traditional vendors will have the extra technology effectively sitting idle for these downturns in project requirements.

Know what resources are required to maximize your migration performance.  You are trying to vacate your datacenter or scale-down your on-premise infrastructure – not build more!

At Cloudficient we understand that it’s hard to accurately predicate hardware requirements before your project starts. We know that additional hardware expenses when the project is running is hard for many customers to account for, and we know that you’re trying to vacate your datacenter or scale-down your on-premise infrastructure – not build more!

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on client needs and creating product offerings that match them. We provide affordable services that are scalable, fast and seamless.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, visit our website, or contact us.