HP-UX Managed Services 3M Case Study

Case Study: 3M selects LCI as managed service vendor for large HP-UX environment

THE CHALLENGE

THE APPROACH

LCI used the same approach they used for their other large managed service.

3M and LCI would work together on a knowledge transfer and transition plan.
LCI would be tied into the 3M incident management system and would be contacted directly when assistance was needed.
LCI would work with and have weekly meetings with a 3M contact to review project progress, discuss challenges, review open issues, etc.
3M and LCI would meet periodically to review service metrics.
LCI would be responsible for staffing the service.
There would be one monthly fee for the service.

Technical responsibilities for LCI would include:

Remediating security vulnerabilities.
Re-implementing the patching process to make sure OS levels are current.
Perform complete patch analysis.
Install patches in test environment.
Work with application groups to test the impact of patches on applications.
Work with application groups to install patches on production servers and to test applications.
Verifying boot image and system backups are functioning as desired, correct any issues, and test.
Create a disaster recovery plan and test.
Providing recommendations/consulting on how to keep the environment viable (E.g. Suggest and investigate the PA-RISC emulator from Stromasys, and lead a project to move servers to AWS when it makes sense to do so).
Ensuring event notification is working as desired.
Providing typical day to day Admin functions and support on a 24x7 basis.

LCI prepared a detailed proposal that was accepted by 3M.

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), a highly regarded manufacturer of 1000’s of products worldwide, was running a large number of mission critical applications on approximately 50 HP9000 and Itanium servers running the HP-UX Operating System. 3M internal IT staff was responsible for managing these servers. When 3M leadership made the decision to migrate all applications to SAP running on Linux, 3M wanted to transition their HP-UX team to the Linux area.

LCI had already proven itself in their ability to manage a large server environment within 3M using a managed service approach. 3M asked LCI to prepare a proposal to take over the HP-UX environment using the same managed service model.

THE RESULTS

LCI successfully took over managing the HP-UX environment, enabling 3M to redeploy their HP-UX administrators to the new Linux/SAP environment. Two years into the engagement, 3M asked LCI to play a vital role in moving 10 HP-UX servers from Japan to the corporate data center in the US. These servers were responsible for approximately 1 billion dollars’ worth of business a year for 3M, so this was a high risk migration. The move was successful, and 3M asked LCI to incorporate those servers into LCI’s scope of work for the HP-UX environment. LCI continues to successfully manage 3M’s HP-UX environment today.