Intertek-PSI lifts and shifts complex IBM Power workloads to Azure using Skytap

Change propels quest for new partnership

Intertek-PSI provides services to geotechnical engineering, construction materials testing, facilities engineering, and environmental consulting with 2,300 skilled personnel across the United States. Since 2015, Intertek-PSI has been a division of Intertek.

Intertek-PSI’s core business relies on Infor Lawson enterprise resource planning software and line-of-business applications based on IBM Power Systems running AIX with interfaces to several x86 front-end systems. These essential applications were hosted and managed by a well-known global IT service provider for roughly a decade. However, faced with expensive IBM Power Systems upgrades, the provider told Intertek-PSI it was ending its Power support, forcing the company to find a new solution within six months.

“Initially, we looked at what it would take to re-platform off of Power,” said Aaron Wetherhold, IT Director, Building & Construction Division, Intertek-PSI. “It would be very complex, very costly, and we would lose some of the scalability and enterprise features that are built into the Power environment.”

Optimizing with Azure and staying aloft with Skytap

With the ERP system being so critical to the company’s business, making any changes to it would introduce unacceptable levels of risk and downtime. The existing provider suggested Wetherhold look at Skytap, a tech firm located in Seattle, as a way to move existing Power workloads to Microsoft Azure without rewriting applications.

“Skytap allows users to lift and shift business-critical applications like ERP systems from on-premises IBM Power hardware to Microsoft Azure without rewriting, opening up cloud scalability and flexibility without requiring an expensive, time-consuming, risky refactoring process,” said John Wrobel, Chief Revenue Officer, Skytap.

Lifting and shifting together to unlock cloud scale and agility

Wetherhold and his team met with Skytap and explained they needed to move four Power Systems, which were the ERP system workhorses, and more than forty x86 machines where front-end and other line-of-business systems resided, along with roughly 29 terabytes of data.

Skytap was well-suited for the task, as it has spent more than a decade working closely with global enterprises to accelerate their journey to the cloud. Founded in 2006, the company makes it easy and safe for customers to move and natively run their traditional systems in the public cloud with minimal change.

Realizing Intertek-PSI had a very complex environment and an extremely large amount of data that needed to be moved, Skytap brought in its partner, Meridian IT, a leading global IT services company, to help plan and manage the migration.

Wetherhold said, “It was an enormous amount of data, to the point where it was almost unreasonable to think that we could move that much data across the public internet, but Meridian figured out how to do that and how to do it successfully.”

Tom Horan, VP, Cloud and Managed Services Sales for Meridian, said, “Intertek-PSI needed partners that could really understand its business and move quickly to deploy a solution.”

The Meridian team decided on an approach using a state-of-the-art Commvault backup system to transfer x86 workloads and FTP for the AIX workloads over a 1GB private network connection.

The entire lift and shift project, from initial planning meetings to final migration, took three months, and moved four LPARs, more than forty x86 VMs and 29 terabytes of data into Skytap on Azure. As issues arose, Skytap and Meridian quickly addressed them to ensure the project stayed on track. According to Wetherhold, “Meridian has a very sophisticated, mature team that was able to solve problems as they came up.”

As a measure of success, Wetherhold said that after running the system normally for the first month after migration without any issues, the real test was doing month-end processing, which proceeded flawlessly.

Key benefits of the migration are upgraded hardware and performance improvements without an increase in cost. Brian Bewley, Senior Account Executive with Meridian, noted that Intertek-PSI is now on the latest Power 9 hardware in Azure rather than the Power 7 systems their previous provider was using. Having everything in Azure coupled with fine-tuning network configurations is expected to improve application performance.

With applications residing in Skytap on Azure and Meridian providing database management services, the move to Azure was cost neutral and Wetherhold anticipates savings in the long term.

Wetherhold said, “Every time the topic of moving was brought up, the idea was just so daunting. We thought we'd have to re-platform everything, and so the ability to take our environment and move it up into the cloud was very successful. The move was so smooth.”

Wetherhold said, “We had to do something. The only reason we did it is because we had to do something. Looking back, I wish we had done this years earlier. It's faster, it's better, and it's probably even better than cost neutral.”