Inside the 48 hours: how they pulled off the seemingly impossible
Working together, the team addressed two major hurdles. First, they needed to allow time for crucial testing, given the sensitive nature of the information. Second, they were not able to touch anything in the datacenters. Although it’s a common practice to install agents to transfer data in chunks, that was not a viable option.
They reached out to Equinix, an Azure partner that provides carrier-neutral datacenters and Internet exchanges, to enable interconnection. Although Equinix traditionally supplies long-term contracts, Microsoft worked with the partner to secure an agreement for a short-term contract that allowed Equinix to build out a cage at its site to serve as an on-ramp to Azure for a large-scale migration over a short time—a new business model for the company.
Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, connected via Equinix, provided a high-speed network connection to Azure with up to a 10-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connection on both primary and backup routing. Azure ExpressRoute enables the creation of private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that’s on-premises or in a colocation environment. The connections do not go over the public Internet and offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security than typical connections over the Internet. To meet the tight timeline, the team doubled the connection to 20 Gbps by bursting across the primary and backup ExpressRoute circuits simultaneously. Functionality tests proved the migration plan was feasible, and a migration weekend was set.
On a Friday evening, the 10 TB of data was downloaded from the originating datacenters in the Dallas, Texas, suburbs of McKinney and Allen onto biometrically encrypted hard disks and physically moved to the Equinix datacenter in Dallas by IT and security personnel. Using ExpressRoute, the data was migrated to Azure, validated, and restored into the new environment. After a final round of tests, the named servers were updated transparently, moving all customer loads to Azure with plenty of time to spare before the Monday morning deadline.
“We understand our customers and their processes, so we managed to have minimal impact on them,” Horrocks said. “Microsoft gave us best practices to get back up as quickly and securely as possible. We chose Microsoft Azure because of our shared commitment to improving the client experience and their unmatched capabilities and willingness to partner with us on our project. It was a network of players coming together to make this happen. At the end of the day, the fact that we all had a common tie back to Azure truly helped us and was pretty incredible.”
The power of the right partnerships
Now that Baker Hill has been successful with Azure, the company won’t stop there as it continues to transform its offerings, leveraging Azure to do even more for its business and customers. Right now, Baker Hill is moving workloads and solutions from other locations over to Azure as part of an ongoing relationship, while the Microsoft DX team, Premier Support team, and Regional Sales and Azure High-Performance teams are providing support.
“We’ve had great success with the Microsoft team,” Bay said. “They have truly played the role of partner, and there’s definitely been a sense of teamwork and support in trying to figure out what challenges a client may be having.”
“The Baker Hill migration demonstrated that Microsoft has a secure, high-speed migration path to Azure for customers with large amounts of data, enabling Microsoft’s NSI partners to create a repeatable practice they can use to help other companies transform by moving to Azure swiftly and securely,” said Marc Spiotta, General Manager of Microsoft DX. “This project transformed a challenge into a blueprint for Microsoft customers to accomplish high-speed migration to Azure for large amounts of data—taking unique needs and transforming them into repeatable solutions.”
In addition, Baker Hill is working closely with Microsoft to explore future offerings for its customers, such as platform as a service. Azure will be a key partner for Baker Hill in the future as it continues to build on its differentiation in the market.
Microsoft is pushing the limits of the Azure platform, and Baker Hill is pushing the platform to benefit its particular customers and industry. It’s the strong partnership Azure has with its customers and partners that makes the difference.
“Before, we looked at the cloud as simply a platform. But now, with Azure, it’s a solution,” Horrocks said.