Pepsi Americas turns to EMC for data centre migration

EMC Corporation today announced that its Information Solutions Consulting group (ISC) has completed a successful storage services engagement at PepsiAmericas, Inc. The project - completed ahead of schedule and on budget - helped PepsiAmericas successfully relocate its complex multi-vendor IT infrastructure to a new facility.

PepsiAmericas, the second largest Pepsi-Cola anchor bottler with $3.2 billion in annual revenue, engaged EMC`s ISC group to conduct a comprehensive analysis of its business systems and information protection requirements, as well as plan, design and manage a move to a new location. EMC managed a team of diverse vendors, covering PepsiAmericas` 15 terabytes of storage, more than 150 Unix and Windows NT servers and an extensive array of networking equipment.

"The most important asset in our data centre is the information itself," said Mark Adkins, PepsiAmericas` Director of Enterprise Infrastructure. "The only measure of success for a project such as this was zero information loss and zero downtime. EMC executed flawlessly, achieving both objectives. They also completed the entire move and migration in 30 hours - a full 10 hours ahead of our 40-hour target timeframe."

As part of the engagement, EMC carried out a complete assessment of the entire PepsiAmericas IT environment to understand the systems, applications and business processes supported by the infrastructure. After the audit, EMC prioritised every application based on service level requirements and developed detailed contingency plans to support the migration.

"EMC Information Solutions Consulting`s exhaustive attention to detail in every aspect of the contingency planning process was impressive. And they were able to assess the risks and costs in a way that we could present to management and back up with documentation, milestones and actions. We have integrated many of the ISC methodologies into our own internal corporate contingency processes."

EMC designed and executed on a migration plan that involved more than 500 discrete tasks, outlining step-by-step when and how each activity needed to be executed and which people and technical resources were involved during each phase of the two-day migration. The entire migration process took three months, from initial planning to final execution.

According to Adkins: "EMC brought a level of expertise in managing and protecting our information that we had not experienced with other consulting firms. Their attention to every detail necessary in understanding the business processes and data dependencies that were critical to our business systems paid off; on moving day, one of the other vendors did not show up, but because the ISC thoroughly understood our infrastructure and had developed contingency plans for just such an occurrence, the project was not put at risk."