Horizon Power re-architected over half of its environment during a migration of workloads out of its data centres and into a private cloud.
Senior Manager Technology Jeff Campbell told the iTnews Podcast the cloud migration was driven partly by the WA government’s cloud policy and commitments to decarbonisation, as well as by a desire to find data solutions to address emerging use cases under its ‘Utility of the Future’ strategy.
Agencies and government-owned companies are being encouraged to adopt cloud services under the state’s cloud policy [pdf].
At the same time, they need to take action to contribute to an ambitious whole-of-government target to cut emissions by 80 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.
Moving out of its data centre and embracing digital and cloud-based systems was seen as a key way for Horizon Power’s IT function to contribute on both fronts.
“The data centre conversation was clear,” Campbell said.
“We wanted to move away from managing bits of tin and look at more of a service catalogue and platform approach, where it didn't really matter which cloud provider we were using, as long as it was scalable, secure and we could leverage both the compute and resource in those cloud environments, while not increasing our carbon footprint.”
Horizon Power’s IT and OT environment was hosted on around 450 servers, and included between 130 and 200 applications that were earmarked for migration.
The migration itself was deconstructed into five phases, with the first being a lift-and-shift of virtualised servers and applications - accounting for around 40 percent of the total environment.
“Then, through the other phases - two to five - it presented us an opportunity to look at our application and server footprint and rationalise that by removing legacy systems that maybe weren't fit-for- purpose anymore, and leverage instead some cloud-native tools to facilitate delivery of the same or a better solution,” Campbell said.
“So we re-platformed and re-architected some of our applications that we currently held on-premises.”
Across these four phases, the remaining 60 percent of the environment was transformed.
Campbell said that while there was some initial hesitancy from parts of the business concerned at latency or performance problems, these quickly evaporated.
“We actually saw an increase in performance, and a reduction in our carbon footprint in the data centres,” he said.
“It’s been two or three months since completion. All things are running relatively well and we're starting to develop metrics around how we can feed that to the sustainability KPIs that we have.”
The decision to go down the private cloud path was partially because some operational technology (OT) workloads weren’t conducive to be run in the public cloud, and partially due to the cyber security requirements on Horizon Power.
“Some of the workloads in the OT environment probably weren't quite ready for public cloud or elements of the public cloud, so hence the whole private cloud approach, and that's worked really well,” Campbell said.
“We wanted to make sure that latency didn't impact some of our OT environments, specifically around their availability.
“We also had to make sure that zones within the private cloud met what we currently had on-prem from a cyber security perspective.
“Cyber underpins a lot of what we're looking at achieving, particularly because we're critical infrastructure in our regional areas, and so cyber and the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI) reforms that are coming through made us think about what we need to protect [our systems and data].
“Private cloud provided that opportunity to make sure that what we had on-prem could be replicated but become more scalable.”
Campbell said that the 40 percent of the environment that was lifted-and-shifted without transformation would be revisited.
“There will be a point in time now that we'll go back and revisit that 40 percent of workloads and look at re-platforming or re-architecting [some of them],” he said.
“We're doing a review of whether the way we deliver that service is fit-for-purpose for the organisation, or whether we then need to look at other solutions that leverage cloud capability more.”
Campbell said that Macquarie Cloud Services was appointed to run Horizon Power’s private cloud following a tender process.
The tender asked specific questions of prospective cloud providers as to how they used “greener technologies” and were reducing their own emissions.
“It was interesting,” Campbell said.
“Some of the tender responses couldn't quite articulate that accurately, but Macquarie actually produced some statistics around the way they've architected their networks and the server infrastructure they were using to provide those platforms would help reduce specific emissions.
“They also translated that into year-on-year savings to Horizon Power and a demonstrable reduction in those emissions, and said they would provide that in a report that we could validate. So that was kind of a neat nuance in terms of how they responded to the questions.”
Data use cases
Horizon Power also saw Macquarie Cloud Services as a good fit for delivering data solutions that could be used on strategic initiatives, such a simulating and modelling what the uptake of renewables would do for regional Western Australia.
“We looked at how we were delivering some of our data solutions,” Campbell said.
“We wanted to use platforms or move to platform-as-a-service to facilitate the faster delivery of digital solutions and to democratise data so the business could use it to make better decisions around what they were going to do as far as strategic initiatives go.”
Campbell noted that data underpins many of the future-facing initiatives and directions that Horizon Power is moving in.
The utility is planning digital process improvements to the way field teams are deployed to the regions, and to deploy geospatial technologies to map its asset footprint, making inspections simpler.
Campbell also saw data-driven opportunities in areas such as forecasting and grid planning, and in delivering customer-facing portals and apps to help customers manage their electricity usage.
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