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Golding, part of the NRW Holdings Group company, assemble and support capable project teams, that deliver value with certainty, for clients wanting land development, civil infrastructure and mining or related services in Eastern Australia.
Golding was established in 1942 and today continues to deliver a wide range of project solutions in urban, regional, and remote locations for the resources, utilities, property, and transport sectors.
The challenge: providing stronger security and scalability
Golding wanted to move beyond private cloud to achieve greater scalability, improved resilience and increased innovation. The solution needed to be cost-effective and maintenance-free to maximise efficiencies.
A managed infrastructure service with a third party wouldn’t deliver everything Golding needed, but it also wasn’t ready to move to native cloud. An infrastructure solution, co-located in the public cloud offered Golding a step towards transitioning to a true native cloud environment in future.
Golding engaged Telstra Purple to migrate virtual machine workloads from the existing Telstra CSX platform to VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS (Amazon Web Services).
The solution: a hybrid cloud with scalability
VMC is the best fit for Golding because it offers the best of private cloud and the required access to native services.
“Telstra Purple was our preferred partner for this body of work because we knew it had the capability to support our vision of data centre and cloud modernisation, and our connectivity and security needs,” says Dom Johnston, IT Manager at Golding.
Telstra Purple planned a Proof of Concept (POC) and a project timeline to demonstrate the capability of VMC and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) for hosting and protecting production VM workloads.
The POC displayed Telstra’s capabilities across strategy, design, delivery and services. A demonstration environment allowed Golding to see the solution at work.
“When we looked at infrastructure platforms offered, the key differentiator was that AWS is more tightly aligned with VMware and had a better disaster recovery capability, which was essential for us. A deep dive into other products showed they weren’t up to the requirements of what we were looking for,” says Johnston.
Hybrid cloud allows Golding to continue managing workloads through vCenter, while being connected to AWS cloud native services via an Elastic Network Interface (ENI). VMC also integrates seamlessly with Cloud DRaaS and is a mature product and platform for managing virtual workloads and DR (Disaster Recovery) capabilities.
Riverbed and Veeam were engaged as vendors and played an important role in the project through to completion.
The result: best-in-class tools and support future growth
The project commenced in February 2022 and was completed on time in mid-2022. Golding has now migrated all workloads from Telstra CSX to the new VMC environment.
Golding has reduced costs and achieved commercial benefits with multiple CSX platforms consolidated into one availability zone for production and another to provide “significantly better” disaster recovery capabilities. In the event of cyber incidents or other issues Golding’s environment can be restored quickly and with certainty. This is crucial to business continuity.
Implementing the latest technology provides a platform for ongoing transformation. Access to AWS native services, located in Amazon’s data centre, give Golding a wealth of options for the future. Having VMware workloads and native services running in the same data centre, and accessible at high speed, creates opportunity for innovation.
“One of the biggest benefits is that it's allowed my team to start asking questions around why we do certain things in a particular way, when we could be making use of new technology to improve outcomes.”
Golding benefits from access to AWS ENI and the availability of AWS native tools like S3, RDS and Redshift managed by Amazon.
VMware on AWS can quickly and easily scale to meet spikes in demand thanks to capacity and performance on tap.
The fling tool’s automation scripts also has the potential to save Golding’s team hours of manual reconfiguration when they rebuild the recovery software defined data centre.
“The process was managed well. The resourcing limitations we faced were well communicated. There was a seamless transition of work from one team to another, and it was a real credit to those involved,” says Johnston.
Golding considers the project a positive “step along the path” towards its aim of moving to a true native cloud environment in future. By combining fast and scalable hybrid cloud connectivity with best-in-class security tools, the organisation feels confident its IT systems will support future growth and innovation.
Learn more about Telstra Solutions
- Telstra Hybrid Cloud Solutions - Telstra Enterprise
- Cloud Solutions from Telstra Enterprise
- Manage and Optimise Cloud from Telstra Enterprise
