Migration Case Study

PageSuite is a leading mobile and tablet digital publishing company. It provides strategic solutions for future-focused publishers, helping them deliver engaging content through multiple channels.

PageSuite aims to enhance the end-user experience, and services content and publishing markets worldwide. Its North and South American client base is managed from its Boston office, while the rest of the world is managed from its headquarters in Kent, England, and its development team based in London.

The challenge

Applications built by PageSuite were based on Microsoft technologies and operated in both AWS and on-premise environments. The client was considering engineering options to further leverage AWS as their platform of choice.

One of the on-premise infrastructure platforms that PageSuite was looking to refresh, was the primary PageSuite Microsoft SQL Database stored in Rackspace. This database was operating in an expensive data centre with ageing hardware. In addition, the remaining estate was already in AWS, so unnecessary data transfer costs were being generated.

PageSuite also required very little to no downtime for this migration project, as their customers span across multiple time zones.

The solution

In order to assess all AWS migration routes available to PageSuite, Rebura performed a Modernisation Viability Assessment (MVA). After evaluating and presenting back their options, it was decided that the migration pathway with the most negligible customer impact – while still fulfilling the business goals (reliability, cost efficiency, minimal downtime and performance) – was a migration to Microsoft SQL on RDS. We also worked with PageSuite and AWS to obtain substantial funding for this project to help offset implementation costs for PageSuite.

Migration

The primary database migration to AWS needed to be completed with very limited downtime for PageSuite and its customers due to its operations spanning UK, USA and Australia and multiple time zones. The database was of significant size, with over 125TB of data. For this reason, Rebura recommended a backup and restore-based migration, utilising an initial full backup and restore into the RDS target, followed by differential backups and restoration by utilising logs.

The results

Rebura successfully migrated the primary data centre within a one-hour downtime window. As a result, PageSuite now entirely operates in the AWS cloud. Data costs have been reduced due to the local nature of the database and its associated services.

The database migration to RDS also provided multi-AZ resilience and improved performance compared to its previous on-premise environment. Right-sizing and other cost-saving exercises will be the primary focus of the project’s next.