The transport company exchanged two of its own data processing centres and a huge physical infrastructure for the public cloud. And five years later, it scaled so much that it decided to migrate to a private cloud.

The SAT transport company provides private and industrial clients with transport services across Ukraine. The list of its services includes full cargo support, logistics, accounting, preparation of transport documentation, transportation, as well as storage of orders and address delivery "in the hands" of the recipient. The SAT transport company has more than 150 divisions across Ukraine, and the maximum delivery time does not exceed 72 hours.

Reasons for moving to the cloud

The business of the SAT transport company is very critical. All processes and deliveries occurring in the company are monitored by the IT department.

Historically, SAT has hosted equipment in its data centres. There were two geographically separated data centres, their own optics, fully duplicated infrastructure, identical capacity of server cabinets. They planned to build a third data centre in the future. In 2011, the company came to the conclusion that the million-dollar investment in hardware was not justified. Due to a power outage and a faulty diesel generator in the data centre, the services were down for several hours. The company decided to rebuild the architecture of its IT infrastructure.

First, the company moved the equipment to the BeMobile data centre. This made it possible to optimize costs, but the effective operation of SAT required a modern solution with high resistance to failure – it means the cloud.

One of the warehouses of the SAT transport company

In search of the perfect cloud operator

The search for a cloud operator took several years. In 2016, GigaCloud was created, and in the same year the company won the tender of the SAT transport company.

The operator provided the customer with a public cloud infrastructure based on the VMware platform. All critical services moved to it, and later the company completely abandoned physical servers. So it was possible to save about 20%.

Migration to a private cloud

For five years, the transport company's infrastructure has been flexibly scaled in the public cloud. In the summer of 2021, SAT specialists ordered additional resources from the operator for the implementation of the HR service. GigaCloud customer happiness department specialists saw that the amount of all the company's resources exceeds the limit at which the use of a private cloud becomes more profitable and more appropriate than a public one. They proposed the SAT transport company to migrate to a private cloud to optimize costs and get more features for the same price. All work performed by GigaCloud technicians is free of charge.

SAT transport company together with volunteers of the "Women's Veteran Movement" NGO delivered more than 2.5 tons of food and water for the residents of Kyiv, occupied and de-occupied territories, as well as our defenders

This is how the migration took place

GigaCloud engineers built a private solution for the SAT company. Next, network connectivity with a virtual data centre hosted in a public cloud was set up. All virtual machines (there were about 50) were not migrated at once, but were divided into groups. After that, the replication task was configured and all virtual machines were being replicated for about a week.

The migration was scheduled for Sunday, from morning to noon, as the downtime is very critical for the business of the SAT transport company. Before that, less critical virtual machines were migrated on Saturday, we checked that everything was fine with them, and the rest were migrated on Sunday. Everything went well and all the machines were up and running. For being on the safe side, GigaCloud specialists stored the client's infrastructure in the public cloud for about two weeks. And only after the company confirmed that everything is working well in the private cloud, they dismantled the old infrastructure.

Result

The SAT transport company gained new opportunities after migrating to a private cloud on the VMware platform.

“Since the transition to the private cloud, our experts have been provided enhanced opportunities for more accurate and adaptive configuration of platforms for specific tasks,” says Anatoly Shcherbakov, CIO of the SAT transport company. For the same costs, the migration to the private cloud also ensured an increase in system resources of about 15%. Summarising all of the above, I would like to note that this migration was justified both from a technical point of view and in terms of saving money on maintaining the server infrastructure.”