Challenge
Veritas had to move its production computer resources from multiple co-located data centers to a new location in just two months. Building their own was not a viable option.
Results
Veritas migrated 10,000 VMs to the cloud and enabled 3,000 global end users in less than 50 days—with zero downtime. The result was a self-service cloud infrastructure that provides full visibility and control over IT systems.
The level of control and management Skytap gives me without having to get involved at a detail level is essential. We really have the flexibility and agility we need to provide better service to our customers, and we’re now getting requests across the business that want to move into Skytap as well.
Payman Armin, VP, CISO and IT Cloud Operation & Services, Veritas
About Veritas
Veritas’ portfolio of data and information management solutions are used by 86% of the global Fortune 500, and their customers depend on consistent data availability and visibility. Veritas also provides an unmatched level of data protection, backup and recovery, and governance across hybrid and multiple public clouds, giving their customers a secure route to digital transformation.
Veritas’s Challenge
After a divestiture made Veritas a privately-held company, Veritas needed to move all the compute resources it used for engineering, product support, presales, and training classes out of various co-located data centers and into a new location. The company had to complete this migration in only two months to maintain the highest levels of customer service, while also satisfying internal business needs.
When Symantec sold Veritas to The Carlyle Group, the change in ownership required Veritas to migrate out of Symantec’s data centers, while The Carlyle Group did not have data centers in place to host Veritas’ operations. “We were very time-limited,” said Payman Armin, VP, CISO and IT Cloud Operation & Services, Veritas.
Veritas’ IT operations team was eager to increase their own agility and pass those improvements on to the teams they support. But bottlenecks often arise when IT is forced to build, provision, and tear-down shared, on-premise environments. The IT operations team at Veritas discovered that modernizing the way they delivered environments was crucial to maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.
Skytap Solution
Skytap partnered with IBM to migrate nearly 700 terabytes of Veritas’ data that spanned over 10,000 VMs and 1500 templates to the cloud in under 50 days—and with zero downtime.
“Skytap was by far the most mature solution out there for what I needed,” said Armin. “There was no way for me to have come close to building something equivalent on our own.”
Skytap’s unique ability to move core business applications to the cloud without the need for reengineering was a perfect fit for Veritas, and by partnering with IBM’s Cloud Services team, Veritas completed a disruption-free migration in less than 50 days. Skytap also provided best practices education and training to onboard more than 3,000 Veritas end users and admins.
Outcomes
The result was a self-service cloud infrastructure that provides full visibility and control over IT systems. Veritas’ support team exemplifies the impact this newfound agility enables in serving Veritas’ customers. Armin noted, “When a customer calls our help desk, our support engineers can now instantly build the environment using one of our templates. There is no request to IT, and no waiting for any service delivery. We’re absolutely providing better service to our end customers.”
Skytap not only matched the storage capabilities of Veritas’ previous data center, but also increased Veritas’ IT agility and scalability across multiple departments. “Our status quo in the past was purely based on service and support,” said Armin. Skytap has opened us up to so many other businesses within Veritas that we can now enable and optimize.”
“We may have been able to build a solution internally from purely a hardware standpoint, but the orchestration level, automation, and everything else Skytap provides would’ve been impossible to replicate fast enough to give our customers what they need.”
Payman Armin, VP, CISO and IT Cloud Operation & Services, Veritas
