Migration Services

Migration Steps to Peak Hosting’s
Peak Total Operations

The following is Peak Hosting’s unique and proprietary process to migrate customers from their existing collocation, managed hosting provider, or cloud solution to Peak Hosting’s “Everything but your code” support.

Peak Hosting is the only fully managed hosting provider, delivering complete IT-as-a-Service to not outsource to expensive third party providers, the migration of your environment from your existing infrastructure to Peak Hosting’s AlwaysUp^SM Architecture. The following steps outline the process to seamlessly migrate any customer without downtime to Peak Total Operations.

Step 1. Architect Custom Solution

The most important part of any managed hosting solution is to get ahead of the scaling and redundancy problems by expertly designing the solution from the start. Peak Hosting’s architects, who consulted to build the largest web properties on the internet, understand your existing infrastructure, where the limitations and scaling pain points are today, and what the future holds for your hardware.

Peak Hosting explores the following areas to consult with your operations and developers on:

•   Applications in use today, their appropriateness, alternate options, and scaling concerns
•   Operating System requirements including patches, upgrades, packages, and customization
•   Database memory, CPU, and IOPS requirements as well as sharding options for scaling
•   Current server topology including: CPU, memory, and disk audits at every tier
•   Network latency throughput, and topology considerations
•   Global and Local load balancing needs
•   Security requirements around NAT, stateful Firewalling, IDS/IDP, VPN, etc.
•   Redundancy audit for both hard drive RAID, application, system, and site redundancy
•   Virtualization options and how appropriate it is at each tier
•   Dedicated individual servers, private enterprise cloud, or hybrid approach
•   Custom monitoring, alerting, or performance trending analysis requirements
•   Disk storage, scaling, volume, RAID, and performance requirements including SAN, DAS, or NAS needs and solution options
•   Support escalation, troubleshooting requests, and expertise consultation
•   Business requirements RE: uptime, maintenance, DR, and BC.

Timeframe – 1 to 2 hours of Q&A

Step 2. Build and Burn-in Architecture

Peak Hosting’s engineers and architects then implement your custom architecture to your specifications and test the environment to ensure the performance, redundancy, failover, application installation monitoring, alerting, performance trend analysis, and operating systems specifications are all correct and to the customer standard.

Timeframe – 1 hour to a few days depending on the complexity of the solution.

Step 3: Migrate Data

Once the system is built and tested, Peak Hosting engineers work with your staff to gain access to your existing infrastructure to implement the migration of your data as instructed and directed by your staff. Peak Hosting’s engineers will work with your team to detail the data that needs to be synchronized and then securely and quickly begin, with your team, the process of not only copying the data, but all of the updates to that data during the rest of the migration process.

Timeframe – Concurrent with steps 1 – 5 and depends on data size and continues through step 8

Step 4: Synchronize Databases

Peak Hosting engineers, under the direction and supervision of your staff, assist with the configuration of your database to enable either Master/Slave replication or log-shipping (Microsoft SQL) to replicate all updates to your existing database infrastructure. Working hand-in-glove with your developers and operations team, our DBA experts ensure that permissions, users, tables, data, and all other appropriate database information is continuously updated to the Peak Hosting environment securely and reliably so all structured data stored in your existing location is automatically and immediately replicated to Peak Hosting.

Timeframe – Concurrent with steps 1 – 5 and depends on data size and continues through step 8

Step 5: Migrate DNS

Even if you change your TTY (time to live) for DNS records to 1 minute, many providers will cache this information for a week or more. Without being aware of this dirty little internet secret, many customers update DNS and/or IP and wonder why the old information is still used for a week or more. Peak Hosting updates the DNS records for your public site to point to our HA bi-costal load balancers and immediately redirects the connection back to your existing infrastructure.
This redirection is completely unnoticed by customers or application and has been used successfully for over a decade by multitudes of Peak Hosting customers and consulting clients. There is no additional perceptible latency or interference with your customer traffic.

Timeframe – Concurrent with steps 6 – 7, but usually at least 1 week

Step 6: Customer implements code

This is the part where the customer implements their code on the Peak Hosting platform. Peak Hosting engineers work with the customer to ensure all of the necessary libraries, packages, and supporting software is installed. The customer is responsible for implementing their code within the new Peak Hosting infrastructure.

Timeframe – TBD based on customer needs

Step 7: Testing code with live data

At this stage, the database has live information and the local data volumes have received both the replication and the updates for the existing data at the current live site. Testing can begin on real code with real data to ensure accuracy and completeness of the application. It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure the completeness of both the data synchronization and the database replication along with all application functionality and features.

Timeframe – TBD based on customer needs

Step 8: Zero downtime cut-over

During a customer determined maintenance window, Peak Hosting engineers “flip the switch” on our HA load balancers to direct customer traffic away from the old platform to the local Peak Hosting servers, ready and tested. Because the database and data volumes have been continuously migrating updates, all data is real time and ready to support customers without interruption in properly architected applications.

Timeframe – about 1 second