A Excellarate client is dedicated to empowering their customers to manage their contracts and payables in a better way. The client needed DevOps expertise to move from one cloud service (Rackspace) as it was very costly to OnX, which was much less expensive and had more customization capabilities.
DevOps is the merging of development and operations. As defined on Wikipedia, It is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.
This server migration project used Excellarate’s DevOps expertise to bring the project to success.
Excellarate’s Role
Excellarate team worked on the following:
- Deploying, maintaining and monitoring legacy Application servers, in all environments (Production, Sales Demo, Development, QA).
- Troubleshoot and administer all of the underlying servers and infrastructure and derive optimum utilization of the server and their infrastructure resources.
- Documenting installation and configuration, and monitoring activities and all admin processes for Documentum, and other key servers.
- Making systems and IT/deployment processes more efficient.
Challenges & Solutions
Excellarate faced many challenges with this server migration project. Documentum (EMC) was new to the Excellarate team, so the team had a steep learning curve, but managed to work on it successfully and within the client’s time constraints. Excellarate now has expertise in Documentum.
Another challenge was that no prior documentation existed. The team did immense research to figure out the current infrastructure and existing server architectures, just to start the initial level of work. The team’s prior skills enabled quick research and discovery.
Excellarate had limited visibility to the product roadmap, so the team could not focus on any specific goals. The team was agile and adapted quickly as requirements arose.
As the team was not given guidance by the client, they did their own R&D to come up with concrete solutions to help the client achieve the goal. Due to this R&D, The Excellarate team gained the client’s confidence right from start, which helped them to get a good control over their IT infrastructure and entire production environment.
Results
Excellarate helped the client save a lot of cost by shifting their servers initially from cloud (iLand) to the local VMS, as the existing servers had the capacity and were underutilized. The team also successfully migrated the client’s thirty (30) servers from Rackspace to OnX. The team successfully did the application deployment through the use of new DevOps tool Puppet.
Technologies Used
- Technology – Documentum –EMC
- Tools –
- Robocopy
- Monitoring tool – Open NMS
- Security tool – Nessus
- Automation tool – Sikuli – was used for customizing product deployment
- Application Deployment & Configuration Management – Puppet
- Group Policy – Win Active Directory
- Scripting Languages – idQL, Powershell, Perl, Puppet, Ant deploy tool,Sikuli (Python Based)
