Live Migration, No Disruption: How Nokia Modernized Brownfield Data Centers

Now you, you've made some decisions architecturally product selection. Um, you now have a real network. You're not, you don't get to build a greenfield.

Um, you know, we're just gonna build this fresh and new with no legacy. You have the historic brownfield migration scenario here, so you had to take this very carefully. Why don't you talk us through what, what did those brownfield migrations look like, knowing that, you know, you weren't directly on the ops team.

I'm sure you had, uh, uh, a lot of involvement in designing the process and being sensitive to what could go wrong here. Nokia is, is a group of many companies that have merged into Nokia. Sure.

Yep. So, so, so that's why you find that those different companies are, are not, were not using the original Nokia rafter equipment. Sure.

So you might be, they might be using other vendors because they were not related to us. I think you Had at least two different vendors in the legacy environment, correct? Yes.

Yes. We, yes, we did To non Nokia, two different non Nokia vendors. Yep.

Two different non Nokia vendors, two different non noki vendors. And, um, and so, so we have existing data centers with existing applications. Mm-hmm.

And they're running, and we, we needed to move them into this common modern data center architecture, you know, based on NetOps and stuff like that. And, and based on Edda and Azure Linux. So we had to migrate all these different data centers from their original equipment and original management platforms to, to Edda and Azure Linux.

Mm-hmm. Without, without outages, without, without causing any outages. So we had to, we had to, to our data centers were at some time, and they are still in some cases, interconnected to different vendors.

Sure. At the same time. So some, some of the servers in, in the, in our SR Linux, in the, in the environment, are actually on the same subnets, for example, on the same network as the servers in the other vendors, uh, EN environment.

Sure. And they're talking with each other as if, as if they, they're, they're just as if they're together in one data center. Excellent.

And so, so, so we've developed this, it, of course, the first time it was very, uh, interesting and challenging, but we think we mastered this to the extent now it's like, become routine, you know, oh, we, there's another data center we have to migrate, therefore we, we connect our Sr Linux e the data center to it, and we begin migrating. And then we go through a process where we build, you know, uh, a network across the two data centers and move servers one by one without, even the application team shouldn't really, I mean, we're not telling the, we're of course we tell them we're migrating, but we, we really tell them, we, you shouldn't see any disruption. You shouldn't, your application shouldn't be affected in the, so we move their service from one environment to other another without them actually seeing effect.

So this is one kind of, of Brownfield, you know, where, and there's, there's another kind of brownfield, there's another kind of where we had to replace, you know, legacy, legacy mm-hmm. Uh, uh, management platform from prior, uh, Nokia companies to, to, to, and we had to do this in one shot, in one shot, because we thought, okay, why don't we have the opportunity we have, it was running SR. Lin Sr.

Linux by itself, but what the management platform was complete was different. Mm-hmm. So we took that and we actually, in one maintenance window, moved all the data center from one management platform, which actually required, you know, reconfiguring every single node in the data center Wow.

To look for the new, and we did this with no hits as well, with no hits as well. So it's really, of course, the digital twin here, the migration with the digital twin is very important. Why?

Mm-hmm. 'cause the digital twin enables you to look at specific, uh, now you need to go down to the no node level, the, the CLI level, and make sure that every port, every subnet, every vlan in, in what it was in the, you know, previous life mm-hmm. Is actually this gonna be, that has exactly the same configuration, eh, of course.

Different, different type of configuration. But the same, same members, same subnet, same everything in the new data center. So the, the digital twin enabled us to make this comparison.

And we did some automation of course, to, to compare them together. But the digital twin was very critical in that, because we couldn't make mistakes in any node. And, uh, you know, every single node had to have the, the correct configuration, otherwise you get an outage.

Have you ever thought about, how did I get along, you know, for years or decades doing all this stuff without digital twin support. Um, it's one of these, you know, pieces of tooling that is just a game changer. It's fascinating to me.

I, I mean, you see, you're saying it's fascinating, but go to a, a common network engineer and Sure. I'll tell you, I'm confident with CLI, I like, I like C-L-I-I-I can understand. I, I know what I'm doing, you know?

Mm-hmm. I can see what I'm implementing, what I'm imp they're, they're not used to this idea of hiding the complexity. Sure.

Hiding the complexity from you or, or, or using modern techniques like, oh, let's, let's put it like a, like a software development cycle. So it actually wasn't, so e you know, you're thinking back now, we were thinking, oh, that's great. You know, how did we live without it?

But when we started, when we started, it was, there was, we got a lot of, you know, opposition. You know, sure. You guys are gonna mess up.

We've never done this before. This has not been done before. Uh, it is gonna be disaster.

This is our factories, uh, uh, you know, our product lines don't do it. You know? Right.

'cause they're used to do it in, in certain way. And we, and architecture was completely, you know, a revolution to what, to everything that it, what, what, what it was in, in the previous life. So, sure.

So thinking backwards, it makes sense, but when, when you are beginning, it was a lot of resistance, you know? Yeah, No, totally understood. And I think so many of us, you know, have been trained to, like, just like you said earlier in our conversation, I've gotta go get the equipment in the lab and test it in the lab before I'll believe that this before I'll trust putting this into production.

And, uh, you know, this digital twin functionality in EA now brings you to that much higher level where I, I don't need to invest in that equipment in the lab. I don't need to go physically cable that up or make sure somebody's there to do it for me. So.