Damart AWS Migration Project

75 Years of Innovation in Fashion & Retail

Owned by fashion house Damartex, Damart has a global presence with operations in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the USA, as well as France. Along with partner companies in Australia, Cyprus and Spain, the fashion specialist has over 10 million customers.

Established in 1953 having developed, designed and patented the first super-thin, soft, breathable thermal fabric, Thermolactyl, innovation has remined at the centre of its ethos. In fact, Damart has continued to develop and design fabrics which push boundaries and see fashion and function converge. Today, its collections are focused on fun, vitality and comfort, and are designed using quality fabrics and sustainable practices.

The Challenge: Understanding and Optimising a complex AWS migration

Damart specialist’s workloads were dispersed across a dedicated data centre, with some already in Amazon Web Services (AWS), running on a combination of Oracle and Microsoft databases.

In migrating all of its workloads to AWS, Damart was keen to fully model all available options for its infrastructure and databases.  Cost control was key in ensuring the migration was successful, and the company needed to ensure it wasn’t under-licenced and therefore vulnerable to audit risk and resulting financial penalties.

To achieve the required level of cost control and visibility necessary, Damart needed to identify and understand the following:

• The total cost of ownership to determine the most appropriate options for migration
• Any licensing impacts including the migration of licensing to the new platform
• Optimisation of licensing models to best suit the technical requirements as well as business productivity needs
• Identify further areas for potential optimisation and cost savings
• How to progress to the next stage to produce vigorous testing for business as usual (BAU) operations
• A roadmap detailing how to best execute on their plan and achieve potential savings.

In focusing on these areas, the organisation aimed to not only manage costs and risks effectively, but also enhance their overall operational efficiency and licensing position.

Synyega Value

Damart engaged Synyega based on the breadth and depth of its skillsets in licencing and cloud migrations. With experience of both Oracle and Microsoft, alongside deep analysis and audit expertise and a fully independent position, Synyega as a AWS OLA partner was a natural choice to evaluate and confirm options for both AWS infrastructure and licensing requirements.

Specifically, Synyega was commissioned to undertake an OLA in advance of a regular audit to ensure best practice was being adhered to, and confirm that Damart’s licencing profile was up to date.

“Our deep Oracle licensing knowledge, client focus, and ability to offer truly independent advice meant that there was great synergy between Synyega and the Damart’s requirements,” comments Stuart Pomfrett, AWS OLA Engagement Lead, Synyega. “Working closely with, and complementing Damart’s migration partner, we worked diligently to educate, add value, refine models and save costs in order to optimise the overall project.”

Delivering measureable outcomes

Synyega worked closely with Damart and its migration partner to review, map and analyse data from a number of sources to ascertain:

• Current workloads to be migrated to AWS
• The best options for the existing Oracle and Microsoft licensing, as well as Damart’s AWS infrastructure and how all of this could be modelled
• Optimisation opportunities across a number of areas and how they could be best achieved.

Having completed the project, the OLA highlighted substantial cost reductions across both Oracle and Microsoft databases. While the majority of these savings were licence-based, proposed adjustments to the AWS infrastructure model resulted in further efficiencies being achieved.

Part of the exercise involved evaluating whether Microsoft licences would be eligible if workloads were moved to a new dedicated Microsoft environment, or whether they’d need to be replaced at additional cost.

Taking place over a timeframe of four months, Synyega consultancy and recommendations were presented to the client within agreed deadlines and cost.  Our recommendations not only promoted diligence and best practice, but meant that the data centre exit could go ahead in the most efficient and optimised way to bring control and confidence on Damart’s infrastructure going forward.

“We presented a detailed summary of our analysis and recommendations, including data from all areas evaluated,” comments Calin Bercu, SAM & Cloud Migrations Consultant, Synyega. “These supported the client’s objective to move to AWS in the most appropriate, efficient and optimised way, allowing the migration project to be concluded effectively.”

“Migrating Oracle workloads to AWS could have exposed significant challenges on either a license included or BYOL model, therefore a comprehensive understanding of the technical licensing details was imperative to this outcome,” Stuart explains. “Our work enabled the client to reduce their exposure to initial licensing and AWS costs by a projected 56% reduction of Oracle licensing costs and projected a nearly 50% reduction in AWS infrastructure, leading to significant total cost savings when compared to a traditional non-optimised lift and shift.”

Enlisting the support of an independent OLA provider like Synyega to simultaneously ratify and optimise the design and migration process, Damart was able to understand its proposed licensing position fully. Enhancing this value further was Synyega’s deep licensing expertise, which we used to recommend revisions to some of the licensing editions and models. These not only helped to consolidate potential savings but maximise operational efficiency.