Global logistics leader sees $3.3m cost savings

moving with the times

Based in Europe, the logistics leader has evolved to become a global logistics partner that offers highly specialised solutions for major industries worldwide.  Originally established as a freight-forwarding company, the organisation today operates globally in thousands of locations worldwide, employing 80,000 professionals that serve hundreds of thousands of customers.

optimising a 20 year legacy environment  

The client’s workloads resided in legacy environments across three large data centres in in the US, Europe and Asia, all of which were running Oracle and Red Hat.  

With the data centres having been set up almost 20 years ago, legacy contracts hadn’t been reviewed since their commencement. An initial audit was therefore necessary to understand the scope and parameters of each contract and pricing plan before migrating to the AWS environment. 

One of the biggest challenges in migrating from a legacy environment to a modern multi-tenant hyperscale one, was transferring the licencing metrics, as the incumbent framework didn’t fit with the new cloud architecture.

Synyega value

Working closely with both the client and AWS, Synyega was engaged to evaluate all aspects and nuances of contracts, establish the licensing position, and look at the best available options in moving workloads to the AWS cloud. 

Throughout a month-long project focused on understanding these areas in the context of the target infrastructure, the Synyega team worked incredibly diligently and efficiently to analyse the following:  

• The total cost of ownership for target environment 
• The most appropriate options for migration
• Modelling of licensing impact including the migration of licensing to the new platform
• Identification of further areas of optimisation including pricing frameworks for support 
• Roadmap showing necessary steps involved in progressing to the next stage.
   

“With both an OLA and a FinOps scope, the challenges in this project were multi-faceted,” comments Calin Bercu, SAM & Cloud Migrations Consultant, Synyega. “Synyega’s team performed an extensive analysis to understand whether it was more efficient to move or remove workloads, as moving them in some cases may have exacerbated costs.   

“We modelled a plethora of scenarios to deliver a range of options, all focused on achieving an optimised profile focused on high performance, the right utilisation of compute power and support resources, and an optimised licensing profile.” 

expediting efficiencies 

The timeframes meant that there was a tight deadline for the client exiting its US, European and Asia data centres, therefore the project had to run incredibly efficiently. The Synyega team worked quickly to gather all of the relevant data and conduct auditing and analysis from which to be able to present recommendations on the optimum approach to migrating to AWS.

delivering optimal outcomes

Working closely with the logistics giant, alongside relevant partners, Synyega reviewed data from across the three data centres via several sources to map out:

• The current workloads due to be migrated
• Models demonstrating the best options for the AWS infrastructure 
• How the best options for the existing licensing could be modelled
• Pricing agreements and support plans 
• Optimisation opportunities across a number of areas and how they could be best executed.

Synyega produced a detailed, data-centric, fully evidenced proposal, outlining a range of options for optimisation and cost savings recommended for the AWS migration. 

“One of the biggest facets of the audit was pricing plans,” Calin explains. “Because we weren’t comparing like for like in the new environment, we worked diligently to understand the levels of application usage and support necessary to optimise costs. The meant that our original OLA remit took on more of a FinOps scope, with recommendations extending beyond licencing when evaluating the most cost effective option for moving to AWS."

“Our report highlighted that moving all of the logistics leader’s workloads to AWS would incur $6.6 million without optimisation. Using Synyega’s recommendations the logistics leader would save $3.3 million, largely through customising price plans based on the environment type and level of usage according to the business-critical nature of applications  

“In understanding the potential cost savings associated with the client’s different environments we mapped the mission critical and time sensitive nature of applications against the support need, to look at the optimum pricing plan for each workload. 

For example, a production environment clearly needs a high level of support as any downtime directly impacts the ability to keep goods moving. Noncritical applications, however, don’t necessarily need the same level of support, and in fact the wrong pricing plan would see much of spend being underutilised and substantial costs being incurred. Recommending a pay as you go plan for these areas was calculated to be most cost effective and a substantial contributor to cost savings overall. 

“The legacy nature of licensing and scale of the shift meant that the OLA was complex. We needed to resolve licensing gaps and ensure the client wasn’t under licensed, or indeed over-provisioned, in migrating to AWS. Licensing agreements therefore had to be re-interpreted because the way licenses are set up for an on-premise environment are different to those in the cloud, as in the cloud you only pay for what you use. It’s actually very easy to over-deploy if this area is not understood fully.” 

Synyega outlined recommendations to reduce licensing usage by 24% through consolidating some workloads, equating to further savings, as well as the most efficient options for deployment within AWS. 

a confident future 

“The value we brought in supporting this client’s migration reflects our extensive experience of both OLA and FinOps projects, and expertise in all of the aspects involved,” Calin concludes. “Because we’re completely independent, we could unpick and perform granular analysis of all nuances and variables, rigorously auditing every aspect of the migration, from licensing, pricing and the optimum scope for the new multi-tenant architecture.

“Not only did the project outline $3.3 million in cost savings, it brought confidence and visibility as well as an optimised framework from which the client could move forward with the migration and its future with AWS.”