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Article · Aug 31, 2017

Foodmix migrates to a new virtualization platform with Carbonite Move

Foodmix migrates to a new virtualization platform with Carbonite Move

Foodmix

Foodmix Marketing Communications is a leading full-service marketing communications firm specializing in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing communications for the food industry.

With clients located around the globe and numerous projects underway at any given time, it's crucial that Foodmix's IT systems remain up and running 24x7. So when the company needed to migrate critical business data to a new server and a new virtualization platform, it needed a solution that could get the job done with near-zero downtime. That's when Foodmix turned to Carbonite Move Powered by DoubleTake, a proven data migration solution that enables easy Windows, Linux and SQL migrations.

“Compared to other migration products I’ve used, Carbonite Move was straightforward. I was actually shocked at how easy it was to use," said Tim Doss, a former senior systems engineer with Outsource Solutions Group, Inc., a managed IT services provider that helped carry out the migration. "Everything moved over without a problem."

The IT challenge
Prior to the migration, Foodmix used VMware to create a virtual server that ran on HP hardware and Microsoft Windows Server 2008. The virtual server was Foodmix's primary file server used for storing, managing and sharing marketing-related documents, videos and images. But it eventually became clear that the VMware-based virtual server did not support many of the USB data cards that Foodmix team members use to load files onto Apple Mac laptop computers.

The team soon discovered that Microsoft Hyper-V, a competing server virtualization platform, did support the data cards. Foodmix already had a license for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and would not incur additional licensing fees if it switched to a new server running Hyper-V. Wanting to simplify licensing and lower costs, Foodmix decided to move forward with the migration. But it had to be completed successfully without disrupting the Foodmix team.

The solution
After the decision was made to move to Hyper-V, Russell Walter, an independent technology consultant who provides ongoing IT support for Foodmix, brought in Outsource Solutions Group to help with the migration.

Carbonite Move was one of a few tools that Walter and Outsource Solution Group's Tim Doss considered for the project. Doss had never used Carbonite Move before, but he had worked extensively with Carbonite Availability Powered by DoubleTake, a powerful high availability solution for Windows and Linux servers. Doss was very pleased with Carbonite Availability so he decided to give Carbonite Move a try.

Carbonite Move can migrate physical or virtual workloads from one server to another using real-time replication to keep the source and target systems synchronized until the new server is fully configured and tested. This gave Doss high confidence that Foodmix’s users would be able to remain online and productive on the old server throughout the migration process, with only negligible downtime required to complete the switchover from the old server to the new one.

Now that the migration is complete, the company will install Carbonite Availability to create a high availability environment for its new virtual server.

“Everything went perfectly," Walter said. "All of the files are there and users didn’t even know we were making the move."

Learn more about Carbonite Move and Carbonite Availability today.

Author

Mark Brunelli

Senior Writer

Mark Brunelli is a Senior Writer on the Corporate Marketing team at Carbonite. He blogs about Carbonite happenings and IT industry trends.

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