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CASE <strong>ST</strong>UDY: WATERAID <strong>ST</strong>UDY: WATERAID<br />
DATA CENTRE MIGRATION:<br />
EXPERTISE ON TAP<br />
RICHARD LANDEN, INFRA<strong>ST</strong>RUCTURE MANAGER FOR WATERAID, EXPLAINS HOW IBM, RECARTA<br />
TECHNOLOGY AND WATERAID'S IT TEAM WORKED TOGETHER TO ACHIEVE A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL<br />
DATA CENTRE MIGRATION RESULTING IN SIGNIFICANT PROCESS AND PERFORMANCE GAINS<br />
WaterAid is an international nongovernmental<br />
organisation (NGO),<br />
focused on water, sanitation and<br />
hygiene. It was originally set up in 1981 as a<br />
response to the UN International Drinking<br />
Water Decade (1981-1990) and now<br />
operates in over 30 countries worldwide.<br />
When WaterAid moved its offices from<br />
Vauxhall to Canary Wharf, it meant the NGO<br />
needed to migrate its IT services as well.<br />
Some of the systems were running core<br />
business, such as the link to direct debit<br />
processing, the phone system and data<br />
warehouse, so it was essential that WaterAid<br />
formed a close partnership to support and<br />
manage a planned transition to the new<br />
environment. WaterAid turned to IBM for its<br />
support and invested in new Lenovo<br />
production servers and IBM storage, namely<br />
an IBM FlashSystem FS5100 array for<br />
production and the FlashSystem 5010 as<br />
backup repository for Veeam.<br />
WaterAid wanted flexibility upon starting its<br />
journey to cloud and were looking for a<br />
storage solution as the foundation to<br />
accelerate them to being cloud-ready and IBM<br />
Storage, which supports containers and is<br />
integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, provided<br />
them with the flexibility to achieve this in the<br />
future.<br />
the UK's leading IT advisory services, which<br />
meant this challenging process became<br />
seamless and achieved positive results within<br />
days of migration.<br />
From the start of the two-month process,<br />
great attention to detail was put into the design<br />
and build of the new solution, to make sure it<br />
was fit for WaterAid's business requirements.<br />
Recarta arranged calls with current customers<br />
to share their experiences of working with IBM<br />
and Lenovo equipment, as the IT team had no<br />
experience with either of these vendors. A<br />
dedicated engineer helped the team work<br />
towards the migration, explaining the different<br />
methodologies for migrating the IT systems<br />
IBM's experience of complex data migration<br />
projects helped WaterAid through the<br />
challenging process of migrating data, to help<br />
plan and execute the complicated operation<br />
successfully. IBM and WaterAid worked in<br />
collaboration with Recarta Technology, one of<br />
08 <strong>ST</strong>ORAGE <strong>Mar</strong>/<strong>Apr</strong> <strong>2021</strong><br />
@<strong>ST</strong>MagAndAwards<br />
www.storagemagazine.co.uk<br />
MAGAZINE
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