YouGov to save £100,000 a year after datacentre migration

Research firm YouGov says it will save £100,000 a year after migrating its IT infrastructure from its Berlin datacentre, which was managed by Interoute, to a new datacentre in London.

Nicholas Carter, director of global systems operations at YouGov, told Computing that the organisation has saved significant sums by switching to its own datacentre.

"The cost savings come from the additional capacity that we wanted to add. If we were trying to implement the current system in our previous environment, we would have had to pay an additional £10,000 to £20,000, if not more," he said.

"In addition, we would have had to pay £3,000 to £4,000 per month to host it."

The firm used virtual infrastructure and data protection provider Veeam Software's backup and replication tool, Backup 5, to migrate its core IT infrastructure. It made the move after having several problems with its datacentre in Berlin.

"We had a managed service in Berlin. YouGov owned the hardware, but the hardware was managed by datacentre provider Interoute and we had a lot of issues with that," explained Carter.

For example, he claimed the cost of adding new hardware was inflated because YouGov had to buy the equipment through Interoute.

"We had the required skillset within the IT team in London, so we decided to move our datacentre there," he said.

The migration process took place after YouGov had built its own datacentre, purchasing all the required hardware itself.

"We used Veeam to do a lot of the complex migration. The physical systems were different. We had NetApp in Berlin and we had a Dell Compellent Storage Array in London, which made it difficult moving data across. This is why we virtualised our environments and used Veeam to migrate the data," said Carter.

YouGov transferred about 30TB of data from Berlin to London from the end of May to 28 July last year.

"A single virtual machine took only eight to nine hours to replicate and, using Veeam, we replicated 40 of them," said Carter.

YouGov was also able to move its applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint and Symantec Enterprise Vault, onto the new infrastructure.

Carter said that YouGov chose Veeam to help it migrate its IT infrastructure because it was looking into backup software for its virtual machines, for which Veeam has a tool. It was also satisfied by the company's reputation.