Case study: 'Trailblazing' speedier public sector cloud migration
Legacy lift-and-shift at Forestry and Land Scotland
The goal was to move everything to public cloud, but when Nick Mahlitz, senior digital infrastructure manager at Forestry and Land Scotland did the numbers it turned out it would take five years at least. Unfortunately, he only had two.
Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) was founded in 2019 when responsibility for Scottish forests was fully devolved to the Scottish government. It manages more than 1.5 million acres of national forests and land, with a remit to promote and manage, not just forestry but tourism, leisure and nature conservation.
Before it separated from the UK Forestry Commission FLS upgraded its data centre with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances, to host its mix of ageing and modern applications, with the intention of moving it all to Microsoft Azure public cloud once the data been sorted and separated and the legacy applications refactored.
As well making it easier to manage, moving to Azure, the Scottish government's favoured cloud, would allow FLS to comply with the country's strict rules on sustainability, cut costs and ease recruitment pressures, or so the plan went.
However, the 30-year-old legacy applications including an ERP system built on Oracle WebLogic and "horrendously non-compliant databases", had other ideas.
"These systems are so temperamental and sensitive to any environmental changes, even at the IP networking level," said Mahlitz. Unfortunately, they were also central to many operations and could not be replaced in the short term. Refactoring was apparently the only option.
In 2021 Mahlitz realised that to refactor the ERP and other core systems so they could be migrated into Azure would take at least five years. And there were two hard deadlines to meet. One was compliance with Scotland's environmental regulations, and another was the ending of the data centre contract in December 2023. There were other plans that couldn't wait five years too, including modernising the stack and introducing Starlink to improve connectivity for the lumberjacks and foresters that make up 70% of the agency's 1,300 people. The agency also makes extensive use of GPUs for 3D modelling of the forest, with plans to expand its AI/ML capabilities for tracking tree diseases and for tourism.
Stop-gap becomes plan A
The migration simply couldn't afford to wait for five years, so Mahlitz started looking for alternatives.
Already a customer of Nutanix and Microsoft from the earlier data centre revamp, he spoke to their representatives for advice.
"So a very casual conversation with Nutanix revealed that there's this product coming up called NC2 clusters, where you can put the Nutanix layer inside of the cloud. Well, that could be my contingency plan."
NC2, Nutanix's hybrid cloud platform, allows applications to run on a variety of on-premises and multiple clouds, meaning that FLS could plausibly vacate the datacentre on time giving it more time for the refactoring.
A proof of concept followed, joining the on-premises data centre to NC2 on Azure in a US data centre and migrating production workloads to it. Even the old legacy systems behaved themselves. "In fact they ran like a charm," Mahlitz said.
Following that, the stop-gap solution became plan A.
"I sat down with Nutanix, and I sat down with Microsoft. I explored the sustainability behind this, I explored the costs behind this, I explored the management of all this, and I struggled to come up with a reason why we wouldn't do this as a primary plan.
"Everything made sense. I can reduce costs, I can have a single management plane so I don't need to up train or recruit any new staff, and I meet my sustainability targets."
Eighteen months of due diligence followed, to ensure this road less travelled really could lead to the required reduction in data centre footprint and energy use, without running into cost overruns, licencing issues and the rest. Satisfied, in June, the whole system - 300 applications, 30 terabytes of data and the supporting infrastructure - was migrated to NC2 on Azure in the UK, a process that took one month assisted by Microsoft and Nutanix. With everything now in the cloud, the on-premises data centre can be safely shut down.
FLS has converted some of its Nutanix licences to run in Azure and plans next year to do the same with another cloud provider to keep options open and reduce the risk of being locked into a single provider.
While Mahlitz and his team are understandably delighted that the scheme paid off, the real-world test will be what it can deliver now and into the future.
"I think the success story will be that I have a forester in the middle of nowhere, and he or she can access all our core servers not realising it's all running on NC2, using all these cloud services, and not having to return to the office to report. That's the proof of what we've delivered."
A trailblazing use case
Mahlitz told Computing that as far as he is aware, lifting-and-shifting a whole data centre to a virtualised layer in the public cloud is unique for a public body in Europe, a sector that is generally risk-averse and tied into deals with integrators and consultancies.
"It's very much a trailblazing of use case for public sector," he said. "In the public sector nobody's taking a risk. Nobody's doing that due diligence."
He added that the early successes of the FLS migration has "generated a great deal of interest" among other government departments with a cloud-first strategy, who don't want to wait years as their old systems are refactored for cloud.