MOVING TO A BETTER STANDARD

Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS), also known as ŠkoFIN, specialises in supporting the sale of Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA, Porsche, Ducati, Bentley and Lamborghini cars. One in three cars sold leaves the Volkswagen Group with VWFS financing including loans, operating leases, branded insurance, service packages and other mobility services.

Strict security requirements, which give financial institutions no breathing space, led VWFS to decide to strengthen the security standards of the primary datacenter operation. They decided to find a partner to guide the company through the selection, preparation and implementation of a solution that would secure their services for the long term.

VWFS contacted ORBIT, which has many years of experience with similar projects. Our initial analysis at the beginning of 2018 confirmed that migrating the datacentre to a more suitable location would be the best way forward for Volkswagen FS. And the odyssey could begin.

WHY ODYSSEY?

We did not want to retreat from the principle that the move will take place after the IT environment has been optimized. This is the only way to ensure that the migration does not impact the customer’s business. Changing the network topology from two to three data centers and increasing LAN and WAN redundancy to high-availability levels proved to be the most difficult.

But most importantly: the management of the VWFS IT network was outsourced to the expert team of the parent company in Germany. We also had to call on Cisco network solutions specialists from NTT and ITS to provide the infrastructure of the new datacenter and the physical implementation of the migration.

The consequence? The mutual cooperation of so many people was extremely difficult despite the intense efforts of all involved. The lengthy troubleshooting of the causes of the repeated instability of the new network design led to the extension of the project by almost a year.

CREATION OF DATACENTER MIGRATION SCENARIO

Preparations for the move included a number of changes to the VWFS IT infrastructure as well as analysis of disaster recovery plans (see the ORBIT Key benefits window in the project). Our goal was to prepare a detailed DC migration plan, in which each activity would have an assigned time and an assigned person. From physical disassembly/removal/installation of HW through the individual steps of backup and shutdown to system power-up, middleware and application layer starts.

We therefore developed a communication matrix that set out the ongoing handover of responsibilities between the individual members of the management team and defined all the roles involved. The matrix included:

• 25 preparatory activities
• 236 steps of migration
• 19 tasks after migration
• dedicated migration time to 54 hours

We also provided on-call and on-site expert support for all critical systems and applications.

UP TO A NEW ADDRESS

In August 2019, we were finally ready. The entire project culminated in a single hectic weekend, during which many months of profound preparation came to fruition: the migration of the Volkswagen FS datacentre took place in just 48 hours. So we managed to finish it 6 hours faster than planned.

Switching on the systems was almost without any unwanted events (no unprocessed data in a non-standard state or a broken system or application layer), so the client’s business did not experience any negative impacts.

Throughout the project, ORBIT was the communication, organizational and analytical hub for all involved VWFS departments, the German VWFS HQ and subcontractors of sub-services. We centralised all information on ongoing troubleshooting, analysed it and suggested alternative approaches if the recommended course of action did not work.

The Volkswagen Financial Services datacenter migration project proved that the ability to ensure the transfer of information between many entities, from a very technical level to the highest management representation, is one of the strong competencies of ORBIT consultants.