A Study in Data Migration Using Virtual Machines

The Migration of Pegasus Foods

Abstract

Pegasus Foods, Inc. is in the food manufacturing business and has two plants, one in Los Angeles, California, and the other facility in Rockwall, Texas. They operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and depend on technology continuity to provide inventory, shipping, billing, and other critical data sets for day to day vocation.

Problem Statement

Pegasus had to shut down their original headquarters- the LA plant, and move their servers, data, and applications to the Rockwall location. The relocation of their technology from Los Angeles to Rockwall meant there would be a period that their data would be unavailable and also the risk of damage during transportation.

Background

Imagine your business required constant access to customer, inventory, and accounting records. Without it, you would be unable to continue your operations. Now imagine you had all this data on servers in your old office on the other side of the country, but you needed to close that office and relocate all that technology to your new headquarters.

The first challenge is, how do you protect your assets from accidental damage during transportation? You would make a backup of the data and store it in the cloud or on mobile, external media. However, if a server is dead on arrival, you will have to procure a new system and rebuild it to a point where you can restore your data; this could take several days or weeks.

Also, a backup alone doesn’t address the data outage with transportation time.

Solution

iTecs Promus’ professional services provided Pegasus with a solution that not only protects their data, but also enables the company to have continuous access to their critical systems during the transportation of their technology.

Leveraging our data center and state-of-the-art backup technology, we continuously backed up their servers, and on the day of the shutdown, converted those backups into virtual machines.

With their servers now running as virtual machines in our data center, we provided a secure connection via a VPN tunnel to their Rockwall facility. Pegasus was able to continue its business operations without any setbacks.

Once their servers arrived safely to the Rockwall destination, we restored their virtual servers and all the data back to the original hardware.

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