Colocation of AWS: Remove the friction from cloud migration

Are you stuck in your colocation facility spending precious dollars on maintaining hardware instead of innovating? Well, you are not alone.

In the decade plus since Amazon Web Services (AWS) released the first cloud services, organizations around the world are seeing the benefits of letting others run their IT infrastructure so that they can get to business making their apps great. However, when considering a cloud migration, many organizations struggle with how to get started, and often these organizations allow the complexity of a cloud migration to be a barrier to building a migration strategy and roadmap.

Today, the potential for disruption makes organizational and technology transformation imperative, so continuing to do business as usual is not an option. Traditional organizational structures and legacy IT infrastructures can be too slow and inflexible to keep up with internal and external demands, making agility the main driver for digital transformation.

Still, market analysts estimate that there are over 70M virtual machines on-premises, in datacenters, or in colocation environments. So, with all of the potential benefits of cloud, why are organizations hesitant to move out of their colocation environments? Working with a wide range of customers, Smartronix has found a few common trends. Often, customers find that migrating workloads to the cloud can be a complex task, requiring an extensive IT portfolio analysis and cloud subject matter expertise to determine how to move their applications. Even seemingly straightforward “lift-and-shift” approaches can require extensive configuration changes and these efforts can introduce risks, result in potential downtime, require new skillsets, divert valuable resources from their mission, and increase IT spend for the short term. Because of these variables, it can be difficult to estimate the costs and timelines of the migration project.

Prior to the cloud becoming pervasive, customers were focused on transitioning from physical to virtual environments. During this period, customers had some primary concerns: Will my application perform as well? Will it be secure? What about my software licenses?

When migrating from virtual environments to the cloud, these same concerns arise, but customers must also deal with the fundamental differences between operating in an on-demand cloud vs. the fixed nature of datacenters. Operations in a datacenter and cloud environments may seem similar on the surface, but in reality, they have many different maintenance requirements that require different skillsets, and these differences equate to significantly higher IT costs until the benefits of migration outweigh the legacy costs. We refer to this as a “critical mass” problem, and as it turns out, one of the biggest blockers to an organization’s cloud transformation is having enough funding to reach “critical mass.” So, how do we create enough critical mass to unlock cloud potential?

To solve this problem, Smartronix and AWS worked collaboratively to create the Colo-to-Cloud Program, which provides a solution to migrate an existing virtual machine environment for a predictable low-cost and short-timeframe migration model, while also matching current capacity and performance.

Benefits of the Program

The Colo-to-Cloud Program bundles services, provides funding, and removes the friction from virtualized migrations by leveraging Smartronix’s automated cloud migration process to move your organizations on-premise VMware environment to VMware Cloud on AWS, while matching your current capacity, tooling, and operational specifications. This program compresses what is typically a multi-year migration timeline into just weeks or months and removes the financial burden of a cloud migration by funding the migration services for qualifying migration workloads. This optimized path brings companies into the cloud quickly, enabling accelerated in-cloud optimization.

• Up to 3x faster migrations
  • Lowers risk to all parties
  • Supports challenging workload migrations (Oracle RAC, Windows, SAP)
  • Leverages existing tools, processes, and technologies
• Optimize in place
  • Increase your adoption of cloud-native services, without needing to fully transform applications all at once
• Cost reduction
  • Customer cost savings averaging ~30%
  • Fixed price migration with defined and repeatable processes to reduce timelines and eliminate double spend

Leverage your investments in VMware-based technologies by using VMware’s Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) capabilities to extend the virtualization concepts you know— abstraction, pooling, and automation — to all datacenter resources — including VMware Cloud on AWS.

Conclusion

The Colo-to-Cloud program is designed to accelerate a cloud migration to allow for faster time to value. Once in VMC, your organization can quickly realize the value of cloud and can immediately start adopting cloud-native services. Smartronix’s automated cloud migration process provides predictable compute, license cost, performance, and migration speed.

The Colo-to-Cloud program removes the friction from your migration, so let Smartronix get you out of the business of maintaining hardware and start focusing on adding value to your organization. For more information on AWS hybrid cloud solutions, be sure to download the new eBook: “Building Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy with AWS” here or contact a Smartronix sales manager for more information.

About Smartronix

Smartronix has been a VMware Partner since 2004 and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner since 2009. As a leader securely implementing IT transformation through cloud technologies, our solutions have helped some of the world’s largest organizations successfully address the complexities of cloud migration, design, and security. This experience has allowed Smartronix to streamline and automate cloud migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS.