01

The Challenge

Discovery values velocity, agility, proactivity and a deep knowledge of technology, so they wanted a partner who would bring all these elements whilst also being great to work with. Cloudreach was a good fit due to our extensive experience helping other, similarly large, enterprise customers migrate huge workloads to the public cloud. 

Discovery had ambitious timelines, and planned to move 20 data centers around the world to the public cloud. They did not have the expertise internally or the resource availability for a project of this scale and nature, and needed a tried and tested approach to data center migration based on best practice and experience.

02

The Solution

Discovery has selected AWS due to its strong reputation in the market and the array of new services AWS delivers, which align well to the needs of a media company like Discovery.

Assessment Phase

  • High Level Design
    • AWS design & connectivity requirements
    • High availability requirements
    • Disaster recovery requirements
    • Backup strategy and monitoring requirements
    • Security and compliance requirements
    • Billing, tags, and alerts
  • Migration Report & Plan
    • Cloud Migration Assessment Report (CMAR)
  • Initial scope (hosts & workloads)
  • Workload migration path (AWS’ 6 ‘R’s)
    • Migration Factory Design
  • Tooling
  • Initial schedule targets
  • Resourcing

Shared Services Phase

  • Tooling Procurement & Project Preparation
  • Environment Verification
  • Expedited Migration Targets
    • Paris & Miami datacenters

Migration Factory

  • In-progress
    • Execute migration of 270 in-scope workloads across 600+ servers globally
    • Low Level Designs (LLDs)
    • 60% rehost, 40% replatform
03

The Outcome

  • Assessed ~800 workloads (apps) across ~2,000 servers positioned across multiple, globally-distributed BUs.
  • Leveraged Cloudreach’s global footprint to design parallel, geographically-focused, migration workstreams.
  • Expedited migration of 52 apps/28 servers to AWS to address time-critical business deadline ahead of actual Migration Factory start.

About Discovery Communications

Discovery Communications, Inc. is a global mass media and entertainment company based in Silver Spring, Maryland. The company started as a single channel in 1985, The Discovery Channel.

Discovery had the goal of migrating 80% of their corporate IT environment to the AWS cloud and were looking for a trusted cloud partner with global capability who was also a good cultural fit from a working perspective. 

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