Overview
Scalzo Foods is a growing Enterprise that was faced with a need to migrate their data centre environments to the Cloud at short notice. Due to changes in their data centre vendor’s business model and VMware license costs, the timescales to complete the migration was significantly shortened. This pressure, when paired with the need to maintain Business as Usual (BAU) operations, had them seek out a partner who could help them devise a solution that could achieve their desired outcome, whilst also reducing risk.
Mantalus rose to the challenge, leveraging the AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to replicate Scalzo’s on-premises virtual machines into the AWS cloud. This approach streamlined and accelerated the migration process, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption.
Background
Scalzo is an Australian food supply success story, founded over 40 years ago in a suburban Melbourne bungalow. From these humble beginnings, its focus on a commitment to food quality and innovation has led to it being a leading supplier of food and food ingredients across Australia and New Zealand with a turnover of over $400 million.
The company sources and distributes food and food ingredients, such as nuts, dried fruit, seeds and grains and pulses such as dried beans and lentils. Scalzo’s capabilities extend from sourcing and supplying raw materials through to manufacturing processes such as roasting, blending and contract packing.
Scalzo’s journey to becoming one of Australia’s leading food businesses has seen them invest heavily in infrastructure and supply chain management, directly managing 4,000 containers and 350,000 pallets a year.
Challenge
Scalzo was faced with a perfect storm. Their data centre vendor was exiting the market and, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMWare had both increased licensing costs, as well as deprecating seamless migration offerings such as VMWare Cloud on AWS (VMC-A).
Working closely with the Scalzo Foods technical team, Mantalus was able to navigate all impacting factors, pivot where needed, and plan a viable AWS migration pathway to Amazon’s native Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) server offering.
Facing an immovable deadline for the exit of the data centre, Mantalus proposed using the AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to to safely ‘lift and shift’ Scalzo’s fleet of virtual machines to AWS, without the need to re-architect the application infrastructure.
Solution – Mantalus + AWS Application Migration Service (AMS MGN)
The AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) automatically converts servers – whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based – into ready-to-use AWS EC2 instances. Once Mantalus deployed our bespoke AWS Landing Zone and Networking blueprint, AWS MGN could continuously replicate Scalzo’s servers to AWS and create up-to-date Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that mirrored Scalzo’s existing virtual machines. This capability enabled Manatlus and Scalzo to choose the appropriate moment to cutover each application.
Partnering with Mantalus, an experienced and award winning AWS vendor, amplified the benefits of an AWS cloud migration. Mantalus brought deep expertise in AWS best practices, ensuring that the migration was not only technically sound but also strategically aligned with Scalzo’s long-term goals. Mantalus’ hands-on experience in deploying complex cloud environments meant that potential challenges were proactively addressed, and the migration process was executed seamlessly. This collaboration allowed Scalzo to maximise the value of their AWS investment, knowing that a trusted partner with a proven track record in successful cloud migrations supported them.
Innovation
This successful migration showcased Mantalus’ ability to leverage proven expertise and the AWS service catalogue to address the pressing challenges faced by Scalzo foods in their data centre exit. By employing AWS MGN, Mantalus was able to swiftly and effectively migrate the customer’s data centre directly to the AWS cloud, replicating the existing structure without the need for complex and costly overhauls.
The true innovation lay in Mantalus’ ability to apply existing, reliable technology to execute a rapid migration at a significantly lower project cost as compared to traditional cloud migration approaches. This made it feasible for Scalzo, and other organisations facing similar pressures to transition their entire data centre footrpint to the AWS cloud seamlessly, without disrupting operations and positioning them to scale efficiently and better manage future growth requirements.
Some of the core drivers of a AWS migration are flexibility, scalability and security, and Scalzo Foods now has the opportunity to take advantage of those benefits whilst decoupling their environment from financially unsustainable hypervisor licensing.
Ongoing Managed Services and Operational Oversight
Mantalus Managed Services (MMS) is our class-leading, bespoke cloud managed service capability, based on five key operational pillars; Security, Availability, Efficiency, Resiliency and Compliance. For various reasons, Mantalus customers choose to implement a level of ongoing assistance and oversight from the Mantalus team, to ensure critical platforms and environments are well protected with appropriate monitoring, alerting and SLAs
In this instance, after a post-project period of hypercare, the customer elected to engage our MMS service for an ongoing annual support and managed services contract, so supplement their incumbent team, as they continue to upskill and enhance internal capability and shift more DevOps practices in-house over time.
Why Mantalus?
Mantalus’ capability is built on being the tip of the spear to solve difficult and unique problems with AWS technology. Our strength is based on having consultants with an array of industry experience, who have themselves faced a litany of complex, business critical, technology roadblocks; and found creative and class-leading ways to solve them.
We’re great at developing AWS centric architectures, where none have existed before. Think platforms or middleware that have never been attempted on AWS by anyone; or even completely AWS native solutions, removing the need for expensive 3rd party solutions.
So, where can we be useful and important to you? Anywhere there’s pain.
When you’re scratching your heads with a tricky use case that doesn’t fit neatly into a known solution or reference architecture…. think Mantalus. We’re the cure!
AWS has a fantastic array of services – and if you partner with Mantalus we can use them to help you solve just about anything.
Mantalus Partner Organisations
Mantalus provides a diverse range of solutions to deliver AWS cloud-based modernisation for any business. Our Mantalus partner organisations enable us to implement solutions that meet the unique and complex needs of our clients, no matter the challenges present.
