Wayne State College Accelerates VMware-to-AWS Migration with Concierto: Zero-Disruption Cloud Transformation
Executive Summary
Wayne State College, a Nebraska higher education institution, modernized its aging VMware infrastructure using Trianz Concierto Migrate, achieving a net-positive financial outcome and zero business disruption.
Following VMware licensing changes and infrastructure end-of-life concerns, the college needed to rapidly migrate its entire datacenter portfolio to AWS Cloud while maintaining uninterrupted academic operations.
Using Concierto's AI-powered automation and hyper-intelligent workflows, Wayne State seamlessly migrated VMs, containers, and virtual desktops from legacy VMware environments, achieving significant operational transformation and cost optimization.
Key Results:
- Net-Positive Economics: Migration fully funded through AWS partnership benefits
- Rapid Migration: Accelerated transformation timeline vs. traditional approaches
- Business Continuity: Zero disruption during academic operations
- Optimization Potential: Substantial TCO reduction roadmap identified
- Risk Mitigation: All end-of-life systems remediated
Client Overview
Industry:
Higher Education
Organization Size:
State College
Transformation Focus:
VMware Migration
Concierto Platform:
Migrate
Wayne State College is a Board of Trustees institution within the Nebraska State Colleges system, serving students across Nebraska with comprehensive educational programs. Operating multiple datacenters supporting extensive virtual infrastructure across diverse operating system environments, the college faced urgent infrastructure modernization needs driven by VMware licensing uncertainty and aging hardware approaching end-of-support.
The Business Challenge
The college's IT infrastructure required urgent transformation due to converging pressures that threatened operational continuity and budget stability.
Key Challenges:
Infrastructure Crisis:
Aging VMware environment with multiple servers running end-of-life operating systems creating critical security and compliance risks.
Vendor Lock-In:
VMware licensing changes following Broadcom acquisition threatened unpredictable cost increases and eliminated flexibility.
Resource Constraints:
Small IT team managing substantial production storage and disaster recovery infrastructure across heterogeneous environments with limited bandwidth.
Academic Continuity:
Zero tolerance for disruption during academic calendar—migration required seamless execution without impacting students, faculty, or administrative operations.
Technical Complexity:
Mixed workload portfolio including virtual machines, containerized applications, virtual desktops, and disaster recovery servers requiring differentiated migration strategies across multiple datacenters.
Skills Gap:
Wayne IT team lacked cloud expertise on (ECS, HA Proxy) and required upskilling to manage new AWS environment post-migration.
Traditional migration approaches could not meet the speed, cost constraints, and zero-disruption requirements while delivering positive financial outcomes.
The Concierto Solution
AI-Powered Cloud Migration Platform
Concierto Migrate delivered the automation and intelligence Wayne State needed through its zero-code, workflow-driven platform, ensuring rapid execution and net-positive economics across the entire transformation.
Intelligent Discovery and Assessment
Concierto automatically mapped Wayne State's entire infrastructure using agentless integration and real-time discovery, analyzing dependencies, resource utilization, and application topology. Its AI-powered assessment engine categorized workloads across the 7Rs framework, producing detailed migration roadmaps and TCO analysis comparing current vs. future state costs.
Hyper-Automated Migration Orchestration
Concierto's intelligent workflows automated complex migration execution—wave planning, move group organization, continuous delta synchronization, and automated cutover orchestration—while providing complete visibility through customer portals. The platform eliminated the vast majority of manual tasks and configuration errors typical in traditional migrations.
Multi-Strategy Migration Engine
The platform executed differentiated strategies based on workload requirements:
- Lift-and-Shift: Virtual machines migrated to AWS with automated right-sizing
- Container Modernization: Legacy containerized workloads transformed to cloud-native platform
- VDI Transformation: Virtual desktops replaced with cloud-based workspace solution
- DR Automation: Disaster recovery infrastructure configured with automated failover
Real-Time Optimization and Sizing
Concierto's continuous monitoring enabled intelligent infrastructure sizing, recommending optimal instance types based on actual utilization patterns. Post-migration analysis identified immediate optimization opportunities and substantial application-level modernization potential.
Enterprise-Grade Training and Enablement
Comprehensive training program integrated with migration execution covering migration concepts, cloud fundamentals, operational best practices, and ongoing optimization techniques.
Built-In Financial Engineering
Concierto's AWS MAP (Migration Acceleration Program) integration automated benefit capture, delivering net-positive migration economics through partner funding, platform credits, and customer consumption credits that offset migration costs.
Trianz supported our migration into AWS with Concierto platform. We experienced zero disruption to our academic operations during the entire transformation. The wave-based migration approach and continuous communication gave us confidence at every step.
Implementation Excellence
Phase 1: Intelligent Assessment and Strategic Planning
Concierto conducted comprehensive discovery across both datacenters, capturing complete infrastructure inventory, application dependencies, and utilization metrics. The platform generated detailed assessment reports including TCO analysis, workload inventory, 7Rs categorization recommendations, and right-sizing analysis based on actual resource consumption.
Phase 2: Mobilize and Foundation Build
Concierto orchestrated AWS environment preparation including Landing Zone configuration, cloud foundational services deployment, Active Directory integration, network connectivity establishment, migration wave planning based on dependency analysis, and PoC execution for container modernization.
Phase 3: Automated Migration Execution
Concierto orchestrated multi-wave migration across production and non-production environments using hyper-automation. Each wave included initial data seeding, continuous delta synchronization, automated cutover, stakeholder validation, and backup configuration—all executed with minimal cutover windows and zero rollbacks.
Phase 4: Hypercare and Knowledge Transfer
Post-migration activities included dedicated hypercare support, performance monitoring and tuning, comprehensive training delivery, knowledge transfer of troubleshooting guides and runbooks, and mentorship program pairing Trianz experts with IT staff for smooth transition to steady-state operations.
Transformation Results & Business Impact
Net-Positive Economics Achieved
The transformation delivered exceptional financial outcomes through AWS partnership benefits, establishing Wayne State as a model for higher education cloud adoption.
Key Outcomes:
- Migration costs fully offset through AWS partnership benefits
- Accelerated timeline vs. traditional migration approaches
- Zero downtime incidents during academic operations
- Complete VMware environment across datacenters successfully migrated
- All end-of-life servers eliminated
- Substantial optimization potential identified
Strategic Impact:
Business Continuity
Completed migration with zero disruption during academic calendar, maintaining student/faculty productivity and satisfaction throughout the transformation.
Financial Transformation
Achieved net-positive cost structure through AWS Migration Acceleration Program benefits—migration costs fully offset through partner funding and customer credits.
Operational Excellence
Established modern cloud foundation with automated disaster recovery, elastic capacity without capital expenditure, and single-pane-of-glass management through Concierto.
Risk Mitigation
Eliminated all end-of-life servers removing critical security vulnerabilities and compliance risks while escaping VMware licensing uncertainty and vendor lock-in.
Skills & Culture Transformation
IT team progressed from legacy administrators to cloud practitioners through structured training, hands-on labs, and mentorship program.
Why Leading Higher Education Institutions Choose Concierto
Proven Higher Education Experience
Specialized understanding of academic calendar constraints, student/faculty experience priorities, and education compliance requirements.
Zero-Disruption Methodology
Continuous replication and wave-based approach ensures academic operations continue uninterrupted throughout transformation.
Platform-Led Automation
Zero-code migration eliminates manual errors and accelerates timelines significantly compared to traditional approaches.
Financial Engineering Expertise
Built-in AWS MAP benefit capture and TCO modeling delivers favorable migration economics for eligible institutions.
Comprehensive Enablement
Structured training programs transform IT teams from legacy administrators to cloud practitioners with hands-on experience.
Ongoing Optimization
Concierto Manage and Maximize modules provide continuous optimization recommendations maintaining cost efficiency post-migration.
Enterprise-Grade Compliance
SOC 2 Type II, ISO certifications, and CSA STAR Silver provide assurance for FERPA, GLBA, and other education regulations.
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