About Nestlé – Glendale, CA
Nestlé is the world’s leading Nutrition, Health and Wellness Company. They’re the world’s largest food company with $10 billion in sales in 2013 and over 25000 employees nationwide.
Development Goals
Despite positioning themselves as global front-runners through massive brand awareness and cutting edge nutritional campaigns, Nestlé’s infrastructure was a bit dated. At the time, they were running their messaging environment on Exchange 2003 Enterprise. Sure, their IT infrastructure was operational and functioning, but improvements were needed to ensure their business model maintained their prominent command as a Fortune 100 powerhouse. Following a comprehensive exploration and analysis of Nestlé’s business needs, it was determined that they needed to upgrade their infrastructure to Exchange 2010 Enterprise.
With a proven track record of delivering quality Exchange consulting services, they hired one of our ExchangeHub consultants to facilitate the migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 for 3 divisions, impacting approximately 60,000 mailboxes total.
Some of the issues they faced included:
- Low network bandwidth between datacenters
- High network latency across country borders
- Size of the environment
- Personnel to do the migration
Development Details
ExchangeHub provided a technical lead to plan, manage, and execute the migration among the 3 divisions of the company. Our consultant directed the migration team in overseeing the active directory attributes, movement of the mailboxes, and eventually, the migration to the messaging system.
Technologies Used
Various technologies were used during the migration, most of which were custom built using PowerShell and visual basic scripting. Most of the script-like application was written by our ExchangeHub on site. Everything was custom coded to ensure brand integrity was maintained.
Technologies included:
- VB Script
- PowerShell
- Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT)
- SQL Database
- Symantec Enterprise Vault (SEV)
The Result
The final result was a fully documented Exchange 2010 messaging system. Our ExchangeHub consultant trained the Wipro level 1 staff on how to best use, troubleshoot, and resolve issues for the new messaging environment on schedule.
The main challenge this project experienced was a limited network bandwidth. Simply moving several gigabytes of data through the network was not an option. To overcome, our Exchange team provided the migration team several options such as exports, multi-batch moves, round the clock small moves, and AD-site work around. Our consultants opted for the method that would least likely impact the operations of the business and moved the mailbox data gradually, but on schedule.
By carefully assessing Nestle’s project delivery expectations and business requirements, we successfully minimized disruptions while effectively improving the performance of our client’s IT infrastructure.