Data hosting secure and sustainable: migration of the production environment to Infomaniak - Our developer in interview

by Elena Höppner Content MarketingPublished on 16.03.2023

Secure, independent, sustainable - these are probably the first characteristics that come to mind when thinking about the quality of a data centre. After all, the data should be kept safe, not fall into the hands of third parties and always be available to customers. And ideally, the whole thing should also be in harmony with the environment. Last month, we were able to migrate our entire Vanillaplan production environment to the data centre of Infomaniak, the leading provider in Switzerland - and took this as an opportunity to take a look behind the scenes of our data processing with a short interview with our developer Carlo.

Carlo, last month you migrated the production environment from Vanillaplan to Infomaniak. Can you tell me what that means?

Migrating basically means that the production environment, the place from which the latest versions of our software as well as updates are transferred to our customers, is transferred from one system to another. In this case, we migrated it to our new hosting provider Infomaniak. To do this, we first had to set up a new production environment and then transfer all the data from the old one to the new production environment.

How did the migration work exactly and how time-consuming was the whole process?

First of all, we set up a new environment, as this had been an issue for us for some time. To do this, we revised our production environment so that we can now implement many things more efficiently and automatically. Then we carried out the migration itself, which took place in several steps. First, of course, we carried out some tests and set up a test environment. We first migrated this to the new infrastructure before it was the turn of the production environment. To do this, we set up the entire system on the new hosting provider, Infomaniak. Afterwards, we switched off the old application so that it was no longer available for a short time and we could migrate the database from the old environment to the new environment so that the users would have the same data. Finally, we were able to switch on the new environment, which means that we redirected the users from the old environment to the new environment.

And what does the final result look like? Does everything work?

We monitored the new production environment for a while and now we have completely deleted the old production environment a few days ago because everything worked well.

What are the advantages of switching to Infomaniak?

Infomaniak is located in Switzerland, just like our previous hosting provider. This is very important for data security, as our customers' data does not leave Switzerland. In addition, Infomaniak is also a "swiss hosting" certified provider. This label certifies that Infomaniak is based in Switzerland and that all data is stored and processed in a data centre in Switzerland. In addition, Infomaniak has several certificates to offer in the area of environmental protection and sustainability and uses very innovative methods to do so. For example, they have a special ventilation system so that the servers in the data centre are only cooled with natural air and no air conditioning is necessary. That's why they are also very good in terms of their energy efficiency.

Thank you very much for the interview, Carlo!