Equinix.com

Equinix IT migrated its on-premises business applications to VMware Cloud on AWS, gaining greater agility, performance, scalability, resiliency, security and sustainability.

VMware Cloud on AWS delivers an optimized, high-performance IaaS platform. For more than a decade, Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company™, has experienced tremendous global growth in revenue (70+ quarters of sustained growth), data centers (220+), customer interconnections and employees. As a result, more digital leaders are investing in Platform Equinix® worldwide to innovate and expand their businesses.

ChallengesThe demands from application workloads, increasing exponentially in volume and complexity, were straining the company’s global IT organization’s existing on-premises infrastructure. In addition, by decreasing its on-premises hardware footprint and migrating its business applications to a cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, the IT team could reduce the company’s power consumption in alignment with its corporate sustainability goals.

The Equinix IT organization spans multiple facilities across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The IT teams were supporting over 21 different application environments with 220+ business and operations apps, the majority of which they wanted to move to the cloud. This included more than 155 host systems and 2,000 production and non-production virtual machines (VMs).

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from hundreds of Availability Zones (AZs) around the world.

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About VMware VMware streamlines the journey for organizations to become digital businesses that deliver better experiences to their customers and empower employees to do their best work. Its software spans application modernization, cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace. Its VMware Cloud on AWS solution rapidly extends, migrates and protects VMware environments in AWS Cloud, VMware’s preferred hybrid cloud option for vSphere workloads.

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Case StudyCloud Migration

Equinix optimizes business apps by 30% in the cloud

Equinix.com

A “cloud-smart” solutionThe company set out to create an agile digital infrastructure where it could optimize the legacy infrastructure it wanted to maintain, migrate legacy business apps and services to the cloud, and replace legacy apps with cloud native over time.

Equinix created a collaborative Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) Program composed of representatives from enterprise servers, applications, information security, database and data analytics, products, and global network and ITSOC/NOCC organizations. As a result of their collaboration, the CCOE team adopted a “cloud-smart” strategy where it analyzed each technology layer, considering best practices rather than a “one-size-fits-all” approach. The strategy focused on how to leverage various combinations of technology components to deploy applications/services optimally, depending on various factors (e.g., business outcome value, scalability, portability, cost, licensing, latency).

The pre-migration on-premises infrastructure was completely virtualized via VMware vSphere and included compute from Dell and Cisco, storage from EMC and NetApp, security from Palo Alto Networks, Juniper and Qualcomm, and networking devices from Juniper and Cisco. The cloud platforms included VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and several SaaS applications.

The CCOE team’s migration strategy included moving 80% of its business applications from its physical infrastructure to the cloud while keeping 5% of its mission-critical applications and databases on-prem and 15% on SaaS platforms. The team chose to keep its mission-critical apps and databases, such as Oracle® Exadata database, Oracle ERP and Siebel CRM, on-premises for licensing, performance and/or security reasons.

Equinix pre-migration business application infrastructure

© 2021 Equinix

Equinix pre-migration business application infrastructure

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“Working with the Equinix Fabric team was pretty awesome; it was only a matter of hours to get VMware Cloud on AWS connectivity through Equinix Fabric. The experience was top of the line.”Nikola Zarecki, Principal Enterprise Architect, Equinix

ResultsOptimized application infrastructureReduced IT resources by 30% on average, including saving $800,000 from retiring on-prem VMs

Enhanced app performanceRealized 2–3 ms latency when accessing on-premises databases and cloud apps

Predictable consistency and securityOptimized app migration/operations/security via common VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud platforms

Reliable HA and DR Achieved zero downtime during the app migration and reduced planned downtime by 25%

Lower energy consumptionSaved on on-premises equipment power and cooling by moving over 150 host systems and 80% of on-premises apps to the cloud

Cloud Migration Case Study 2

Equinix.com

Application availability and disaster recovery Equinix provides connectivity across its global platform via Equinix Fabric in all of its major metro locations, allowing users to connect to any cloud service provider (CSP). The IT team took a “design-to-fail” approach that anticipates clouds will have outages that need to be mitigated using software-defined data center (SDDC) redundancy, allowing users to achieve the required service level agreements (SLAs) as demanded by their business.

Because the business-critical applications were running in the cloud and the mission-critical database was running on-premises, it was vital that this high level of redundancy was achieved across multiple tiers of this hybrid IT environment.

Equinix multiple availability zones

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The IT team also created a data center DR environment replication between the SV (primary) and Chicago (DR/secondary) data centers. In the future, the IT team plans to host its HA and DR in the cloud. Future connectivity will also include private access to the public internet via Equinix Internet Exchange®.

Phased application migration to the cloudTaking the necessary steps to perform a proof of concept (POC) for all its applications, the Equinix team migrated apps and clusters in phases, piloting each phase to minimize risk. The IT team followed the best practices for migration to VMware Cloud on AWS by leveraging TIBCO middleware across the entire distributed application stack. It also leveraged VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Exchange (HCX) programmable migration tool, which allowed the team to set up the bandwidth required and customize and schedule the migration. Migrating from its VMware vSphere on-premises environment to VMware Cloud on AWS enabled Equinix to maintain consistency between its applications’ physical infrastructure and IaaS environment, eliminating the need to re-architect for and maintain a different public cloud platform.

Optimized hybrid multicloud IT infrastructure The Equinix IT organization analyzed each layer of its business application infrastructure stack. It migrated all Equinix application and web servers to VMware Cloud on AWS using Equinix Fabric™ software-defined interconnection. Equinix Fabric provides high-performance, low-latency private connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS and delivers a seamless hybrid cloud by extending an enterprise on-premises vSphere environment to the AWS Cloud.

Leveraging AWS Direct Connect on Equinix Fabric, the IT organization privately and securely connected on-premises databases, apps and cloud environments across its global infrastructure. The Equinix IT team created a hybrid multicloud architecture with VMware on AWS adjacent to its on-premises Oracle Exadata database. Using the Equinix Fabric portal, the team deployed private connections to VMware Cloud on AWS in just under two hours. This placed its consolidated, hyperconverged Oracle databases proximate to cloud resources/services for optimal performance and latency, delivering an enhanced user experience. It also ensured greater data security, privacy and control by keeping its databases on-premises.

Cloud Migration Case Study 3

Equinix.com

Equinix also met with the VMware Cloud on AWS team weekly to help analyze the data from the POCs and actual migration. “We had a very tight communication between VMware and our apps and database teams to design the best cloud architecture for the specific apps’ logical relationships and workload traffic flows,” said Nikola Zarecki, Principal Enterprise Architect, Equinix.

A phased approach to migrating applications to the cloud

© 2021 Equinix 3

A Phased Approach to Migrating Applications to the Cloud

Phase 2

Define target state• Evaluation

• Pilots

• Business case

• Objectives, targets, SLAs and performance

Equinix Fabric™

Equinix InternetExchange®

Complete app migrationto VMWare Cloud (VMC)

Select cloud vendorsand set up hybrid cloud

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All new apps to bedeployed on VMC

Set up DR environmentin the cloud

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Phase 1 CompletePre-Migration Stabilization

Continuousoptimization,innovation

Value realized Moving 80% of its apps from a legacy, on-premises infrastructure to an optimized IaaS platform by leveraging Equinix Fabric has enabled all business applications and workloads to function on high-performance, secure network underpinning that provides the flexibility to accommodate an increasingly hybrid multicloud world. Some of the key specific benefits realized are:

Optimized application infrastructure Hosting the majority of its business application infrastructure in VMware Cloud on AWS and further optimizing its on-premises infrastructure, the IT team was able to realize an average resource optimization and cost savings of 30% (not including the energy savings from reducing system power and cooling) that could be reinvested into new IT projects. By retiring 518 VMs from its legacy infrastructure, it saved $800,000. It also consolidated its on-prem databases (from 287 to 138) via the hyperconverged Oracle Exadata database and leveraged higher-density systems in the VMware Cloud for additional optimizations and savings.

Application networkEquinix optimized its legacy, on-premises applications (i.e., Oracle database and ERP and Siebel CRM) for efficiency and the best performance possible. For example, it’s maintaining 2–3 millisecond latency when accessing the Oracle databases, up to 40% performance improvement in Siebel business-critical workloads, and a 1,300% improvement for refreshes. Equinix Fabric with AWS Direct Connect is also delivering consistent 2–3 ms latency performance when accessing multiple clouds.

End-to-end security by designIt was also critical for Equinix to include its information security team from day one and throughout the process for its security design. This ensured that security best practices and compliance standards were integrated into the architecture and processes. The Equinix security team will continue to improve upon its “secure by design” approach by automating its software development life cycle processes and DevOps/security capabilities, including continuous integration and deployment, and ultimately deliver infrastructure as code. This aligns with the shift toward greater DevSecOps automation and agility enabled by native cloud APIs, which enables faster design and deployment and removes the human error factor.

As a result of its excellent planning and collaborative architecture design, Equinix created a direct and secure interconnected hybrid multicloud architecture that supports a multigeographic application footprint. It delivers the best possible user quality of experience (QoE) while keeping mission-critical apps and data highly secure and available. This dynamic architecture also provides the flexibility to distribute any remaining on-premises apps to the cloud, as well as move workloads to other cloud providers if/when needed. It also provides a solid foundation for the future modernization of globally distributed applications.

Cloud Migration Case Study 4

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© 2021 Equinix, Inc.

Power your digital leadership at EquinixOn Platform Equinix®, digital leaders bring together all the right places, partners and possibilities to create the foundational infrastructure they need to succeed. On a single global platform, place infrastructure wherever you need it. Connect to everything you need to succeed. Seize opportunity with agility, speed and confidence.

CS_VMware Cloud on AWS_EN-LTR | 15516 | v062221 | Q121

About EquinixEquinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company™. Digital leaders harness our trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. We enable our customers to access all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to accelerate advantage. With Equinix, they can scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value.

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Predictable consistency and securityBy standardizing on VMware vSphere for its on-premises infrastructure and VMware Cloud on AWS for its IaaS platform, Equinix experienced a fast and flexible deployment, maintained consistency between app and infrastructure environments, and optimized resource consumption and maintenance overhead. In addition, the end-to-end programmable security architecture across the application, database and network infrastructure stack ensured data and application protection.

Reliable high availability and disaster recoveryThe clustered and redundant SDDC infrastructure, app, database and network design delivered reliable application HA and DR with consistent 3–4 millisecond (ms) network latency across all links and a failover time of ~1 second, resulting in up to 99.999% application availability. As a result, the team reduced its planned downtime by 25% and had zero outages during the migration. Moving to an IaaS platform also reduced the number of outages caused by component failures.

Lower energy consumptionMoving 155 systems and 2,000 VMs to VMware Cloud on AWS enabled the IT organization to contribute to the company’s sustainability goal of reducing direct and indirect energy consumption and meeting its 100% commitment toward clean and renewable energy.

“Equinix IT has adopted a hybrid multicloud architecture across a more optimized digital infrastructure to run multitudes of existing business workloads between public clouds and on-premises data centers. Equinix Fabric provides the foundation for unifying distributed environments and putting clouds close to apps, data and users for a high QoE. We now have the freedom and the agility to expand workloads within VMware on AWS and across multiple vendors’ clouds.”

Amr El-Arabaty, VP Enterprise Architecture, Equinix

Cloud Migration Case Study 5