HighVail in Action
Financial Services & Insurance Provider Use Cases
A Tier 1 Canadian Bank
Network File System (NFS) Production Migration to NetApp
- Aging storage infrastructure outages were directly impacting revenue growth and ability to create market risk profiles.
- Also resulted in penalties and delays in regulatory reporting.
- HighVail replaced the existing storage with a modern, scalable platform, that incorporated the necessary capacity and performance that matched our business partners’ workload and expectations.
- Migrated more than 100 terabytes, 7,000 users and over 150 mission critical application shares.
- Executed over 21 consecutive weekends.
- Reduced original timelines by 9 months.
- Delivered on time, while exceeding our business partners’ expectations.
- Zero associated defects or outages.
Major Canadian Financial Services & Insurance Provider
Ansible & Automation at Scale for IT Operations
- The existing Ansible automation processes were only built to address the needs at the time.
- Parameterization of static facts using YAML files is cumbersome and demanding process that is prone to errors.
- Maintenance of static sources of truth is time consuming – a whole new job to maintain files.
- Using our new practice for Data Modelling we have extended Ansible functionality with Python code.
- Ansible Automation data model now creates successful predictable pattern for pluggable Ansible automation
- We use existing source of truth to dynamically create static Yaml sources that feed into Configuration management processes
- Ansible playbook now needs only a few parameters to run while simplifying continuous integration and deployment model.
- No more need to statically maintain Yaml facts, as DB is used for sourcing any automation process.
- Scale IT Ops automation without performance hits and make sure facts used in automation are guaranteed, normalized, standardized and validated before job runs which brings dramatic improvements in CI/CD process.
A Tier 1 Canadian Bank
VMware Modernization
- Siloed approach and infrastructure inconsistencies throughout the production VMware environment
- Increased planned and unplanned downtime
- Inconsistent application performance
- Slow times to resolution for the LOB
- Mission critical, tier-1 applications
- HighVail performed a thorough review of the current environment state and interviewed stakeholders and supporting infrastructure leads
- Modernized hardware and software platforms
- Consolidation of three separate legacy IT infrastructures onto one platform.
- Increased efficiencies and streamlined operations.
- Eliminated the need for any production application downtime during platform maintenance windows.
- Providing better application availability and mobility, with more efficient resource utilization better and future ability to scale.
Major Canadian Financial Services & Insurance Provider
OpenShift Environment Configuration
- Needed expert professional in the field of DevOps, Storage, Middleware, and OpenShift containerization to configure overall OCP environment ecosystem from best practices
- Resolving accumulated bugs
- HighVail resolved abnormalities in OCP cluster
- Provided a self-healing architecture and deployment
- Customer recovered from serious bugs and issues, and are now running a healthy OCP cluster handling their mission critical business applications with significantly better resource utilization as well as tightened security.
Empire Life Insurance
Containerizing Critical Servers On-Premise
- Mission critical systems running on old, end of life and unmaintainable systems.
- Applications running on these systems were critical to the business function.
- Application performance was poor due to system environment.
- Implemented modern hardware and DR policies
- Containerized critical servers spanning multiple racks in on premise data centre
- Migrated containers onto single server and replicated to a secondary server at their DR site
- Facilitated fail-over ensuring application availability
- Power and cooling savings alone covered the cost of the new modern servers and hardware
- Massive 3-fold increase in application performance
- Eliminated multiple single points of failure
Major Canadian Financial Services & Insurance Provider
Terraform & Ansible Automation for Lab Provisioning in AWS
- Each participant required their own Kubernetes lab cluster that did not conflict with other attendees.
- If a participant’s lab environment broke down, it would have to be re-provisioned quickly.
- All Kubernetes cluster members needed to be configured identically.
- Using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider for Terraform, we built a dynamic infrastructure to isolate attendees in their own lab environment.
- Next, we utilized Ansible to configure all Kubernetes clusters.
- Utilizing our Kubernetes branded training we on-boarded participants, providing them with their own personalized environment.
- The client gained the ability to deploy their training environment in AWS using a consistent and repeatable pattern.
- Created an accelerated enablement experience for the customer.
- The agile automation templates that were created can be reused or leveraged for other content.
Major Canadian Financial Services & Insurance Provider
DevOps and Automation for IT OPS Curriculum
- The existing corporate culture largely utilized manual workflow patterns for IT Ops.
- Knowledge barriers and complex processes created friction in developing an effective Infrastructure-as-Code strategy.
- The IT Ops centric teams needed to learn new tooling, automation & DevOps methodology.
- Specific knowledge gaps were identified within the organization and customized content was developed to enable innovation inside IT Ops practices.
- By taking a holistic approach, we adopted new technology and agile processes for IT Ops.
- Learn Git, Yaml, Ansible Core, Ansible Tower.
- Encourage innovation, which is historically a conservative IT segment.
- Build DevOps driven OPS practice, where teams share and collaborate.
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