Know the case

Why we shutdown

Teevo acquired a local datacenter company in 2012, and in a few years made it one of the leading datacenters in southern Brazil. Cloud computing has always been an important strategy and Teevo already had a clear vision that in the near future all organizations would make their journey to the cloud.

The datacenter had an enviable architecture. More than 160 virtual machines, 5 clusters using virtualization architecture, 164 vCPU operating on high capacity servers, more than 2TB of memory, 4 clusters with 26 storage nodes providing more than 150 Tb of storage, more than 120 LUNs provisioned and more of 6000 IOPs in use, let alone the 2 backup robots running uninterruptedly with LTO tapes ensuring more than 100 Tb of backup storage.

With the architecture operating within the traffic exchange point of the Rio Grande do Sul telecom operators, an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and more than 1.5 Gbps of links from 4 different operators, the datacenter provided cloud computing infrastructure for more than 300 customers in the market, offering e-commerce platforms, email and collaboration solutions, disaster recovery, backup, among other offers.

In the first years of the datacenter's operation, we tracked the accelerated growth of Microsoft Office 365 and Azure cloud solutions, prompting us to seek the Tier-1 CSP Tier level at the start of FY18. The number of customers migrated from our datacenter to Microsoft's cloud platform only increased for both Office 365 and Azure during that time.

Azure's infrastructure provided much more scalable, versatile services with better provisioning and greater availability of resources to meet customer demands, simplified administration, broader offerings of features and the best: technologies that virtually any local datacenter can’t provide. Managing customers in both environments, Teevo’s datacenter and Microsoft Azure, began to make no sense. 

Shutting down, what do we win?

Over time, the account did not closed anymore! Maintaining a local datacenter, provisioning advance computing resources and storage, managing multi-product licensing, power, cooling, contingencies, backups, and everything else a datacenter must own, requires huge upfront investment and high operating cost (OPEX).

In addition, a significant cost of the operation is concentrated in the teams needed to manage the datacenter, from the process of implementing a new customer to 24x7 monitoring of the environment, ensuring the availability of resources for customers.

It became increasingly clear that a regional datacenter no longer served a market that focused on business and less on infrastructure, adopting artificial intelligence, cognitive services, IoT and elastic services. It was time to make a decision!

How we shutdown?

Microsoft was instrumental in the decision to shut down the datacenter. The first provocation came in 2017 in a meeting between Teevo and representatives of Microsoft Brazil, Latam and the Corp, to discuss strategies for growth in the cloud. Planning with Microsoft continued in the following months, while the number of customers migrating to Azure only increased. At the FY19 planning meeting, held in August 2018, the #DesligueiMeuDataCenter project was finally created, the result of planning with Microsoft Brazil's business, marketing, incentives, finance, products and support areas.

The sequence of actions involved a complex project that needed to consider all the details for a migration of all customers still using the Teevo’s datacenter to Azure and/or Office 365. It was a partnership work between the Microsoft and Teevo’s teams, and a set of marketing actions that included the production of a video-case by Microsoft, publication of the hotsite www.desligueimeudatacenter.com.br, digital marketing campaign and events, as well as MadDays for generating new leads, among other activities.

Planning for a migration with this degree of complexity was not an easy task. we were faced with a complex scenario of several clients working on different platforms, different versions of operating systems and with very specific characteristics. It took 100+ hours of planning, mapping the particularities of each client, and 750+ hours to migrate all systems to Azure.

We've been looking for Microsoft Advisory (Advanced Support for Partners) to find an alternative to migrating customers in batches rather than the traditional one-to-one, which would allow us to gain valuable time. This new technique of batch migration was unprecedented, both for Teevo and Microsoft, and was a challenge for both technical teams, which was a critical success factor for migration.

When we actually put the #DesligueiMeuDataCenter project running, there were 60 active customers in the Teevo’s regional datacenter, who went through the process of migrating to Azure. During the project, we identified a series of opportunities to further explore the cloud's capabilities with these customers, mapped them all, and started working on the demands of Datacenter Transformation.

When migrating to Microsoft Azure we eliminate the need to manage basic infrastructure, power, space, hardware, internet links, cooling, storage, backup, and all other resources to keep the datacenter available. We concentrate the management of the resources provided to our customers in one staff only and no longer in different structures and disciplines as we used to.

We also ceased to carry out upfront investments in our structure and follow the flexibility our customers experience with Azure: pay as you go! The cash flow was adjusted for an OPEX based transaction, following the market movements.

However, the most important point of this migration is not infrastructure, but it signals to our customers that our focus is also on adding value to the business areas of these organizations, working better on Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Data and AI , and Applications. The first projects in this sense are already running and are presented in our success stories that we’ve included in the website we’ve launched.

The movement

The #DesligueiMeuDataCenter started as a customer migration project from Teevo’s datacenter to Azure, but we understand that this is only the beginning of a great market movement and clearly signals to customers that it does not make sense anymore to invest on local infrastructure and datacenter.

The focus of IT managers should be on looking at business, how to add value to organizations and use the technologies available to ensure the differential in a market that is increasingly competitive. As long as IT areas are paying attention to infrastructure, there is no room to think about how to adopt platforms to effectively perform digital transformation.

We have no doubt that in a few years it will be very rare to find customers who still make efforts to manage on-premises environments. To ensure the survival of these organizations, the focus should be on the understanding of how technology can be used to transform business.

We are sharing a message to the market that the journey to the cloud is inevitable, even for companies offering datacenter services through local infrastructures, and Teevo was Brazil's first datacenter to carry out this movement.

Count on TEEVO to shut down your Data Center.

Get in touch and get information, ask questions and find the solutions you need.