The Right Strategy

“Milestone’s engineering discipline extends beyond the technology itself to encompass all aspects of the customer’s requirements,” said Rob Edinger, MSIA & CISSP, Audit and Security Manager, Milestone Systems. “We approach project management with the same rigorous attention to detail as the design, architecture and engineering of complex technology solutions.”

An ongoing, large-scale project provides a case in point. The Milestone Systems team is migrating hundreds of legacy F5 3DNS devices to BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager appliances across three data centers in different time zones. In addition to unmatched F5 expertise, Milestone adds value by determining how to best meet the customer’s goals. Because of the complexity of the back-end systems, the Milestone team could not use a one-time configuration move utility. Milestone Systems had to develop a plan to ensure that each individual migration goes through the customer’s formal change management requirements.

“Because of the customer’s complex change management requirements, the large number of business units involved and the number of people in the technology management chain, it’s been very difficult for them to move from their legacy environment to the F5 Global Traffic Manager environment,” said Edinger. “Milestone Systems came on board to help the customer plan and vet an enterprise-wide project that would help them with that process. We provided senior-level engineering expertise and a project manager to oversee the entire 16- or 17-month project from concept to completion.”

Technology is complicated, but many enterprises have internal processes that can be even more complex. Milestone Systems understands that, and employs project managers, engineers and consultants who work with customers to develop and execute the right strategy for each technology project.

Step by Step

Milestone engineers are migrating each “wide IP” — F5’s term for a fully qualified domain name that is mapped to a set of virtual servers that host the domain’s content — using tools they developed specifically for this project. Edinger meets with the customer’s project management team twice a week, and receives a list of the wide IPs that need to be migrated in the next period, which is typically about two or three weeks out.

“The project management lifecycle is a couple of weeks long because of the change control and peer review processes and the need to deal with any arbitrations with a vast array of people who have input into the issue,” he said. “Their internal project management team deals with all of their internal business units but we helped them establish how they were going to go about it.”

Milestone Systems engineers take each existing 3DNS configuration, run it through a custom-built tool and choose the applications that are going to be migrated. The next part of the process is to generate the script that will be run in the new Global Traffic Manager environment.

“We also have to do a lot of renaming of objects,” said Edinger. “The goal is to not only migrate the wide IPs but make them more manageable within the production environment. We’re helping them standardize on new naming conventions and making sure that things are named appropriately based upon the types of devices and their locations.”

Managing Complexity

Because each load-balanced device under management requires a custom configuration, Milestone Systems tailors each week’s script specifically for the customer’s F5 Global Traffic Management environment.

“There are a lot of different things that we have to take into account,” Edinger said. “Some of the devices refer directly to the actual web server that the application resides on. Those are relatively straightforward because the F5 Global Traffic Manager just needs to know what the end system is. But then there are other scenarios where we need to know if the application is behind a load balancer, what the name of the load balancer is, whether we have to rename it, etc.

“This is a multi-step process because we wind up having to go in and make other changes due to the complexity of their architecture. They can’t simply make a wholesale cutover because they have devices of different ages and with different operating systems out there. There are different rules as to how we can migrate the various pieces of equipment — it gets rather complicated.”

“Complicated” never stopped the experts at Milestone Systems. Organizations that need specialty knowledge to design and implement a network security or acceleration project count on Milestone Systems to provide the thought leadership, project management skills and subject-matter expertise to get the project done correctly and on time.

Milestone Systems delivers not only engineering skills but advanced project analysis to determine the optimum path to work within our customers' business requirements to meet your near-term and long-term goals. Contact 877-771-9510 or info@milestonesystems.com to begin your discussion.