Adesa UK operates vehicle remarketing services for several major automative brands in the UK, including the Vauxhall NetworkQ service.

By working with BJSS, Adesa has successfully migrated its ageing NetworkQ environment to Microsoft Azure. This new environment has allowed Adesa to provide a more scalable, performant and robust solution to its client while reducing its operating costs significantly.

Challenge 

Adesa was running its NetworkQ workloads on Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2012 infrastructure. This was then shared with other customer workloads in a Rackspace data centre.

These workloads included Adesa’s Sales Portal and Online Auction website, back-office administration systems and its Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP system.

The environment contained many inter-related applications which had been developed over a period of around ten years. It was brittle and prone to performance issues and frequent outages, causing customer satisfaction issues. Also, the Windows Server 2008 Operating system was out of support since January 2020, leaving the environments vulnerable.

Solution 

BJSS was initially onboarded to provide Adesa with a 20-day consulting engagement to evaluate the NetworkQ environment and recommend a migration approach. Given the complex nature of the environment and Adesa’s tight timelines, we recommended a complete IaaS migration of the as-is NetworkQ environment to Microsoft Azure.

With a lack of Azure skills in-house, Adesa further engaged BJSS to conduct the migration, leaving it to conduct the Business Validation (UAT) testing.

The BJSS solution consisted of two workstreams: business analysis and test management support to help Adesa understand the impact on its business processes and formulate a test strategy, and a technical migration workstream which involved: 

  • Building a new cloud landing zone in Azure
  • Implementing secure networking using a hub-spoke network topology
  • Migrating the physical & virtual servers from Rackspace to Azure virtual machines using the Azure Migrate toolset
  • Migrating the SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL Managed Instance using the Azure Database Migration Service
  • Migrating RavenDB database workloads to Azure
  • Migrating the SQL Server Reporting Service environment to Azure
  • Decoupling the NetworkQ environment from other shared Adesa systems

Benefits 

The NetworkQ server and database workloads were migrated to Azure successfully. The new environment allows Adesa to provide a more scalable, performant, and robust solution to their client whilst significantly reducing their operating costs. Adesa will be able to realize immediate benefits in scalability, performance & resilience, along with opportunities for incremental improvements such as moving selected web applications to the Azure App Service.