Condé Nast
Digital media meets digital era.
An Overview
The Challenge
Condé Nast’s usage of traditional data centers was keeping it from expanding digitally. They wanted to expand their digital footprint to more agilely compete in the digital market.
The Solution
We migrated over 300 servers to AWS, shutting down Condé Nast’s primary data center and readying it to expand its digital footprint.
The Outcome
By closing its existing data center footprint, Condé Nast will be gaining the agility, flexibility, and cost savings that AWS enables, improving performance by 30% to 40% and operating costs by nearly 40%.
01
The Business Challenges
Condé Nast made a decision to transfer all IT assets to a Cloud provider as part of an overall strategy for readying its publications business to more agilely compete in the digital market. The company engaged 2nd Watch in support of the closure of its primary data center, which hosts all of its mission-critical, run-the-business applications. With the 60,000 plus square-foot datacenter decommissioned, the company needed to migrate over 300 servers onto the AWS platform. The company made the decision to get out of the data center game in order to gain the agility and flexibility needed to expand its digital footprint.
02
The 2nd Watch Solution & the Business Benefits
In conjunction with AWS Professional Services, 2nd Watch assisted in an active lift-and-shift of the company’s development, test, and production environments into AWS EC2. The overall in-scope inventory was over 300 systems ranging in complexity from IT support and Citrix to Oracle and PeopleSoft.
2nd Watch was responsible for developing and implementing a migration strategy, from scratch, to reliably move systems while minimizing downtime to production systems. This was not achievable through any current AWS toolset at the scale required to move these 300+ systems, in the aggressive two-month timeframe required by the media company. This included the assessment of the existing footprint, the build of a new environment within AWS, scheduling of migrations, and the actual migration of systems. The company’s new environment will utilize over 360 Amazon EC2 instances, 1300 Amazon EBS volumes with and without pIOPS for storage, and roughly 80 TB of data.
By closing its existing data center footprint, Condé Nast will be gaining the agility, flexibility, and cost savings that AWS enables, improving performance by 30 to 40 percent and operating costs by nearly 40 percent. The company has removed itself from the antiquated data center business and acquired increased agility to meet both business pressures for cost reduction as well as scalability to meet future business demands.
The media company also plans to target additional colocation facilities for future closure, completely ridding itself of its data center operations and migrating wholly to the cloud.
