Challenge:

Sunkist Growers had an impending hardware refresh of aging equipment in a colocation facility as well as the need to re-platform a business-critical application. Given the significant investment in new hardware, Sunkist decided to look at the economics of migrating to public cloud.

Based on their strong, trusted relationship with Converge for services including colocation, connectivity, and disaster recovery, Sunkist engaged Converge to help determine the potential TCO benefits they could realize by migrating to public cloud.

Because Sunkist had very aggressive timelines for implementation and wanted to ensure minimum disruption in operational support for the re-platform of the business-critical application, they decided to look at VMware Cloud on AWS.

Solution:

Working closely with the VMware and AWS technical teams, Converge executed a 14-day proof of concept, along with a complete TCO analysis detailing the acceleration of Sunkist’s cloud migration by implementing VMware Cloud on AWS. They would realize operational consistency with on-prem SDDC, seamless large-scale workload portability, and direct access to AWS-native services.

To enable Sunkist to move from proof of concept to production quickly and successfully, Converge provided a hybrid cloud readiness assessment, hybrid cloud integration services, and a review of their VMware Cloud on AWS managed services.

After Sunkist determined a VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid cloud solution would meet their business goals and drive TCO savings, the Converge delivery team leveraged VMware HCX to accelerate their migration to the cloud. Converge provided AWS operational support and implemented AWS Direct Connect, as well as S3 native services, as part of the solution.

Sunkist was able to leverage existing third-party offerings including Citrix, via AWS Marketplace, and Veeam in their new hybrid cloud solution. Additionally, Converge was selected as the VMware Cloud on AWS managed service provider for their service desk.

Results:

The decision to implement VMware Cloud on AWS allowed Sunkist to migrate their business-critical applications to the cloud more efficiently than standing up new hardware in their colocation. This solution will provide a three-year TCO savings of 25%.