Country Road Group’s VMware Cloud on AWS migration for optimised operations and resilience
In response to Country Road Group’s challenge amidst the demerger of David Jones, Cevo and D6 successfully migrated over 60 systems, comprising 130 servers, into VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). Leveraging a comprehensive three-phase approach – Assess, Mobilise, and Migrate – Cevo and D6 ensured minimal disruption to operations while achieving a parallel environment in functionality and performance. The migration has resulted in improved security, operational efficiency, high availability, cost optimisation, like-for-like performance, and robust disaster recovery capabilities for the leading retailer.
VMware on AWS (VMC)
Migration
Modernise
Retail
Industry
Country Road Group is one of Australia’s largest specialty fashion retailers, with a market-leading position in the mid- to upper-tier segment. The group comprises five iconic brands: Country Road, Mimco, Trenery, Witchery, and Politix. Country Road Group is part of the leading Southern Hemisphere retail group, Woolworths Holdings Limited (South Africa).
Business challenge
Country Road Group (CRG) faced a critical challenge following the acquisition of David Jones by Anchorage in December 2022, with both organisations operating under a single entity and relying on shared IT systems and platforms hosted on AWS infrastructure. As a result of the demerger, CRG needed to separate these shared services and migrate them to a separate environment by July 2024.
The migration scope was extensive, with more than 60 systems spread across over 130 servers, including critical functions such as payroll, point-of-sale, people management and IT operational and management systems. The challenge was not only to migrate these systems into AWS VMware on Cloud (VMC) while ensuring minimal disruption to operations, but to ensure the new infrastructure provided a parallel environment in terms of functionality and performance. This meant deploying into the new AWS Melbourne Region to minimise latency to existing systems and maintain a like-for-like environment.
Solution
Cevo and D6, Cevo’s sibling business, collaborated CRG to successfully migrate more than 60 systems into AWS VMC. We leveraged Cevo’s proven three-phase approach to migrations: Assess, Mobilise, Migrate.
Phase 1: Assess
We began the project with a comprehensive assessment phase, working to understand the environment by collecting hardware requirements and existing processes including disaster recovery, software licensing requirements and system dependencies.
Phase 2: Mobilise
Over three weeks, we began mobilisation with key technology components including connectivity. By the end of this phase, Cevo had built a new environment in the at-the-time new AWS Melbourne Region, connected to the existing data centre, and created plans for implementing and testing backups, as well as ensuring readiness for the first production migration.
Phase 3: Migrate
During this phase, Cevo planned and executed multiple streams of work, including implementing and configuring Veeam data backups in VMC to ensure ongoing backup capabilities. We migrated the scoped Linux and Windows workloads to VMC in multiple waves with minimal downtime, including re-IP addressing into new IP address space. Cevo conducted handover and showcase sessions throughout the project, assessed and monitored, and ensured seamless migration into VMC using methods like VMC bulk migration through HCX to keep cutovers to only a few minutes.
As part of the migration phase, Cevo implemented VMware Live Recovery (VLR, formerly VCDR) to support multi-region failover between Melbourne and Sydney AWS Regions. This implementation significantly reduced the effort required for failover and audit reporting, with a test disaster recovery failover completed within four hours, including restoration and power on of all the virtual machines (VMs) in the Melbourne Region. This ensures CRG has robust disaster recovery capabilities while minimising downtime and operational risks.
“Country Road Group’s migration to VMware on AWS (VMC) has been a great success. Proactive support from Cevo and D6 has been critical in facilitating our migration from our datacentre to support our David Jones separation project, enabling us to meet challenging deadlines with confidence. To ensure business value could be achieved quickly, we worked with Cevo and D6 to migrate to VMC as this met our requirements to seamlessly migrate from our data centre.”
Scott Coppock
CIO, Country Road Group
Outcomes
Cevo successfully migrated over 130 of Country Road Group’s servers including more than 60 workloads to the purpose-built VMC platform in the AWS Melbourne Region. Key outcomes include:
- Improved security, with VMware hosts now fully managed and monitored by VMware for compliance.
- Improved operational efficiency by transitioning the management, patching and securing of core VMware components to VMware’s management, freeing up CRG’s resources to focus on high-value business activities.
- Achieved high availability with an AWS VMC stretched cluster and the multi-AZ capabilities of the AWS Melbourne Region. This setup ensures continuity of operations by hosting and failing over workloads in the event of a host failure, minimising downtime and disruptions.
- Cost optimisation with the effective management of disk utilisation and requirements between production and non-production workloads. Backup and VLR capabilities also help to ensure data integrity and minimise the risk of data loss, further enhancing cost efficiency by leveraging cheaper storage options.
- Successful achievement of like-for-like performance following the migration, in addition to consolidation of hosts using AWS’s i4i instance hosts.
- Positive impact on CRG’s sustainability efforts via efficient resource utilisation and maximising the use of provisioned hosts, resulting in a minimised data centre footprint, and reduced operational overheads for IT management teams.
- Disaster recovery readiness by implementing disaster recovery testing and auditing through VMware VLR, providing CRG with simple failover and audit reporting, meeting business continuity requirements and enhancing overall resilience.
“We are proud that Country Road Group is the first customer to utilise the VMC environment in the AWS Melbourne Region, ensuring continued agility and low latency connectivity with our existing IT systems.”
Scott Coppock
CIO, Country Road Group
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