CCI Is Driving Business Value to Their Customers After Upgrading Azure Resources to Azure Resource Manager ARM Model

Since its founding in 1949, CCI has been developing high-quality brake fluids based on accident investigation and on-going research. The results of this research enabled them to become a top chemical company. The chemical balance scale they have used from its creation has become a symbol of their company, representing their unyielding spirit to tackle difficult issues in-car safety.

Company

Size: 51-200 employees
Location: USA – Illinois

Industry

Manufacturing
Automotive

Practice Areas

Cloud Infrastructure & Management

Challenge

To concentrate more on their business challenges, CCI leveraged Cloud 9 to assist in their IT infra maintenance. CCI leveraged the expertise within Cloud 9 and stayed confident with peace of mind knowing their servers could continue to rely on the system to back up their data, to get current information.

CCI needed to upgrade their Azure resources in order to leverage the new services offered by Microsoft, that would provide them with a systematic way of managing their growing business. After their initial assessment, Cloud 9 designed a detailed strategic plan to meet both immediate and long-term goals for CCI.

IT Challenges were:

CCI’s Azure resources were growing at an accelerated rate and they needed to implement an essential Disaster Recovery framework for these resources in order to support the desired Business Continuity
For “Classic” resources and unavailability of a DR function within the Classic Environment, CCI was in immediate need for an upgrade to the new Azure Resource Manager ARM model

Solution

The CCI Dynamic AX environment was set up as “classic” or “V1” services, which leverage the Azure Service Manager (ASM). In order to upgrade all the “Classic” resources to ARM to Microsoft’s new ARM or V2, Cloud 9 proposed to break down the project into 4 phases.

Phase 0: Pre-Validation Cloud 9 configured VM backups for all 37 servers. Cloud 9 worked with CCI to come up with test cases for UAT after the upgrade. Phase 1: Validate Cloud 9 validated the current state of resources and verified if the resources are capable of upgrading to ARM. In this phase, Cloud 9 documented and identified all challenges and came up with unique and custom solutions to mitigate the challenges for a successful upgrade. Phase 2: Prepare Cloud 9 fixed all the errors identified in the validation phase and prepared the resources for the upgrade. Phase 3: Check Manually All resources were monitored closely by Cloud 9 and CCI for a week after the preparation phase. All issues were identified during this phase and restored the VMs back to their earlier state. Phase 4: Commit or Abort Based on the results of the earlier phases, a decision was made to move forward with the upgrade. Cloud 9 was able to successfully upgrade the virtual network followed by virtual machines and finally the storage accounts.

Results

Cloud 9 was successfully able to upgrade all the resources in CCI’s environment to the new resource manager model in Azure. This would pave the path for Cloud 9 and CCI to plan, implement, and leverage all the tools and models available in the ARM model.

It empowered CCI teams to remain focused on driving business value to their customers instead of managing a back-end infrastructure. Rapid deployment has allowed CCI to ramp-up the value they deliver to their customers and increase value in a competitive market.