Montgomery County ADAMHS was facing the challenge of end-of-life hardware, at a location they couldn’t easily get to. The MCADAMHS’ team was in need of a partner for ongoing management of the devices and the business-critical data they held, as well as someone to design and implement long-term recommendations.

As such, the journey to the DataYard cloud began.

Objective

The long-term plans for the MCADAMHS’ server environment were threefold:

1. Physically move the existing servers from the datacenter they were at to DataYard’s datacenter.
2. Allow DataYard engineers access to the server infrastructure in order to identify and document the current functionality, find areas of improvement, and create a roadmap for…
3. …a migration to the Cloud to alleviate the need for physical hardware altogether.

The Challenge

There were a variety of challenges in taking that first step: 

Due to a lack of redundancy across the physical servers, the county would experience downtime during the move from one datacenter to the other. 
Given the age of the physical hardware, there was a risk that, once turned off, a server might not come back online after the move. 
Furthermore, the overall age of the servers meant we were working on borrowed time to complete all of the objectives.

The Solution

We worked closely with the county to prepare for the move – communicating with all stakeholders to understand what we could about the environment prior to shutting the first server down. Once we were ready, we scheduled a weekend of downtime and assisted with the physical move into our facility. The odds were in our favor, as all servers came to life once installed in the DataYard datacenter.

We breathed a sigh of relief, but didn’t rest for long – as soon as we could, we began our thorough documentation of the environment, and developed plans for a full cloud migration.

The Result

Just under a year after the move to DataYard’s datacenter, the full migration to DataYard’s private cloud was complete. 

Now, DataYard provides 24x7x365 management, monitoring, and maintenance of MCADAMHS’ business-critical applications – focusing on their business in the cloud, so that the MCADAMHS’ team can focus on their work here on Earth.