Effect ICT Solutions: Designing a High-Performance Storage and Migration Strategy for a Leading International Architect
About the Customer
Founded in 1993, MVRDV is a Dutch architecture and urbanism practice engaged in progressive projects around the world. Their highly collaborative, research-based design methodology involves clients, stakeholders, and experts from a wide range of fields beginning early on in the creative process. Today, MVRDV employs over 300 people, delivering exemplary solutions that enable cities and landscapes to develop
The Challenge
Datadobi partner, Effect ICT Solutions, is a specialist solutions provider for SMEs focusing on traditional office automation and cloud-related solutions ranging from workplace management, cybersecurity, and hosted telephony to cloud infrastructure and backup.
For over a decade, Effect ICT Solutions has worked with its customer, MVRDV, managing its entire worldwide IT estate. MVRDV’s legacy storage appliance was nearing the end of its lifespan, warranty period, and was almost at capacity. With large amounts of existing data to store, manage, and backup, MVRDV also generates and retains significant levels of data on an ongoing basis across its global office locations.
As a result, the decision was made to replace their existing storage technology and backup platforms with a long-term solution that could deliver the high performance, reliability, flexibility, and security that are key to supporting the business and its future growth. In setting out its requirements to implement a new, high-availability solution, Effect ICT Solutions also wanted to update and reorganize MVRDV’s security management capabilities and restructure the way its data was saved.
Central to the success of the entire strategy was selecting a proven solution to migrate its existing data to the new storage architecture. This had to be accomplished with minimal disruption to IT services and operational impact. That’s where Datadobi’s entrprise-class migration software, DobiMigrate, was able to assist.
The Solution
Working closely with MVRDV’s IT team, Effect ICT Solutions carried out resizing calculations to understand the requirements for the storage solution in the years ahead. Having selected a trusted solution, Effect ICT Solutions was also planning another key part of the project—migrating MVRDV’s data from its legacy storage architecture to the new solution.
Utilizing Datadobi’s enterprise-class migration software, DobiMigrate, Effect ICT Solutions conducted the migration process across seven phases. “We began with large chunks of non mission-critical data and as the process advanced, moved to those sections of data that were accessed the most or was in use by the MVRDV team at the time,” said Henk Nachtegaal, Director, Effect ICT Solutions.
“For significant migration projects such as this, it’s usually necessary to build various scripts and develop bespoke tooling, but our engineers were impressed with the high degree of automation that Datadobi delivered,” said Nachtegaal. “It also provided absolute, verifiable proof that the migration process is 100% accurate—that was vital for MVRDV as it is for any business moving their data to a new storage solution.”
Typically, Effect ICT Solutions approach to migration is to carry out the process in one exercise, creating a 1-to-1 copy of the data to ensure that nothing is missed. In this situation, Datadobi offered the flexibility to migrate defined folders according to need. They were able to easily set up and manage the migration process to suit MVRDV’s unique needs.
Over the course of several months, and despite the huge challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic which occurred during the early stages of the project, MVRDV’s data was successfully migrated to its new storage architecture. MVRDV now has a high-availability storage and backup solution where its data is optimized for performance and ease of management.
“The work we carried out during the project using DobiMigrate also has a long-term benefit in that if we need to make changes to the way data is stored and managed, we can do so much quicker than would have been possible with MVRDV’s previous solution,” said Nachtegaal.
“Without Datadobi, we wouldn’t have been able to complete the rollout of new storage and backup infrastructure, implement a new approach to security management and successfully complete the migration process in a single project. It was a critical factor in delivering a successful solution.” Nachtegaal continued