BareMetal servers and cabinet switching hardware are coming to end-of-life. New application releases requires more server resources and are supported on virtualized environment. A Tier 1 Communication Service Provider (CSP) is seeking nationwide the migration of two interdependent signaling applications from BareMetal platform to on-premise virtualized environment.
Subcontracted by Oracle Global Communications Business Unit, CELENIUM SME was charged to lead the efforts. He built and deployed labs to emulate the end customer deployment. Then developed the Network Architecture and Planning Design and documented the Labs topology. He configured HPE Gen8, Gen9 Rack Mount and Blade Servers, Cisco 4948, HPE 6120, 6125 and 6127 enclosure switches. Then deployed and installed the in-service applications’ release on 30 servers per lab. He conducted a applications upgrade to bring it to the release level permissible for migration to virtualization.
In the process of prototyping, he developed a set of Method of Procedures (MoP). First the virtualization environment creation, network-level servers migration, and site-level servers migration. The collective set of procedures drove the lab and production infrastructure modernization, from BareMetal to virtualized environment, as well as service transformation from one release to the next level up. The virtualization environment was built on the latest version of Oracle Linux 8 using Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM).
In support of project team, he enhanced the migration and deployment approaches to simplify, streamline and speed up sites transition to customer. With this approach, he aided Oracle sales and project management bring in revenues sooner that exceeded the early estimate, while aiming to finish the project within end customer target completion date. An advantage in his approach is minimizing the gap in the order of transitioning service to customer. Wherein the site migration for both applications in cascade instead of a long wait to complete one application across the entire network followed by the other. As such reducing risk due to prolonged release discrepancy at the site level as well as long wait to handover sites to customer responsibility.
“Ahmad is highly motivated and driven to perfection in everything he does. Starting from understanding of the customers’ business challenges, to providing a detailed approach to solving those challenges. Ahmad then proceeds to providing highly detailed method of procedures that are validated and flawlessly executed by the team.”
Hanan Dadon, Sr. Manager, Consulting Architecture & Solutions at Oracle