Customer Profile
Dyno Nobel is the global leader in commercial explosives technology and blasting expertise. The company traces its roots back to 1865 and Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prize. Today Dyno Nobel now has over 3,000 employees across the globe.
Business Drivers
Dyno Nobel has many distant remote sites, which creates complexities when it comes to protecting the organization’s mission-critical data. “We take safety very seriously, so we end up building our plants away from densely populated areas. But we also wanted to move our data away from the remote environment and out to the cloud,” said Chris Pack, Enterprise Infrastructure Lead at Dyno Nobel. “We chose Office 365 for the ‘cloudification’ of our IT environment.” Dyno Nobel was ready for a change.
The Challenge: An Office 365 Migration With Zero User Impact
Dyno Nobel’s remote sites sometimes experience latency and low bandwidth limitations, due to the mentioned distant remote sites. The slow connectivity turned the organization’s Office 365 migration from its local Network File Systems into a massive undertaking.
“Microsoft offered some migration tools that were more of a ‘lift and shift’ mentality that had us making a copy of our entire data footprint and taking it offline while it was being uploaded,” Pack said. “But our systems need to be online 24/7, 365. We needed something that could move our data continually, picking up deltas as users access their content, while also using the minimum bandwidth.”
Dyno Nobel searched for other migration tools to complete their move to Office 365. However what they truly needed was a synchronization tool.
“Looking at the functionality, we discovered that DryvIQ was going to be a perfect fit to keep our users online, keep our data secure and make sure we were successful with our migration,” Pack said.
The Solution
“Once we were able to start syncing over our content, the Office 365 migration went very smoothly,” said Craig Milner, IT Project Coordinator at Dyno Nobel.
DryvIQ enabled Milner and his team to throttle its upload speeds as well as schedule synchronization jobs to run after business hours. Therefore softening the impact the migration had on the already limited bandwidth at the remote sites. “Before we were using up to 90 percent of the bandwidth at these remote sites. With DryvIQ we could throttle it back to not impact our users’ daily work.”
In addition to enabling business operations to continue at their normal pace, DryvIQ enabled users to access content on their local drives as usual while it was being moved. As a result, all deltas were synchronized as files were being updated.
Dyno Nobel users were also able to know exactly where their data was at any given time. “Our users would often ask where their files were. We were able to look into DryvIQ’s real-time audit logs and let them know exactly when they could expect their files to show up in Office 365,” Milner said.
The Results
After eight months Dyno Nobel had fully synchronized and migrated 10 TB of data from its more than 45 global remote sites into Office 365. Overall moving over 3,000 network home drives into the cloud with no disruption to business operations.
“DryvIQ was the tool that made this happen. And it was almost entirely transparent to our end users,” Pack said. “They were able to keep working throughout the entire process. We kept their data safe and secure.”
Milner said the efficiency of the project was due in part to the robust support Dyno Nobel received from the DryvIQ team. “The team was very knowledgeable. We are very impressed with their support.”
“Our migration to Office 365 was a huge success, and DryvIQ played a big part in making it so successful,” Pack said.
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