Carbel Auto Group is one of the largest automotive retail groups in Brazil with 54 years of operation and over 10 dealership brands. Carbel Group is embedded in the automotive industry and plays a significant role in vehicle distribution and sales in the Brazilian market, mainly in Minas Gerais.
Carbel Group faced a major challenge related to its on-premise server infrastructure hosted in a colocation model at a data center service provider. The situation was characterized by aging physical legacy servers with outdated Microsoft SQL Server 2016, which had limited computational capacity and little room for growth in the volume of their critical databases. Additionally, the end of support for their appliances and outdated software licenses raised concerns regarding obsolescence, compliance, and the need for a technology refresh in their computing environment. Addressing these challenges was necessary to provide software updates, adequate server support, and the ability to respond promptly to new business demands.
Failure to address this challenge could lead to a series of adverse consequences for the Carbel Group. The end of server and software support could result in security vulnerabilities, potential performance degradation, and unavailability of critical applications. Furthermore, the lack of infrastructure agility could directly impact the company’s business needs, hindering the deployment of new ventures.
There was significant concern regarding the Dealernet environment’s database, which plays a crucial role in managing the entire automotive fleet inventory and trade flow. Carbel Group recognized the critical importance of this database and was determined to ensure that the migration to the AWS cloud was seamless and without interruptions. With an average of 2500 concurrent user sessions connected simultaneously to the environment, extending beyond business hours, including weekends, the stability and continuous availability of the database were of utmost importance for Carbel Group’s ongoing and efficient operation. Thus, the migration process was meticulously planned and executed to minimize any impact on ongoing operations, ensuring a smooth and trouble-free transition for all users and systems involved. Carbel is already a well-established brand in the automotive market and segregates its critical systems into 5 databases, collectively occupying 5 terabytes of storage purely in SSD for high integration between its systems.
Carbel Group saw AWS as a way to immediately overcome these challenges and achieve an agile and scalable infrastructure, meeting all present and future demands. Carbel already had a long-standing alliance with ForceOne, chosen for its expertise in AWS implementations and migrations from on-premise environments. This partnership served as a cornerstone to conduct a comprehensive migration study of its architecture to the AWS cloud. After deciding to proceed with AWS, it became clear that migrating MS SQL Server was the most critical aspect and needed to be carried out with minimal downtime. This pillar defined the choice of the ForceOne partner and the AWS Cloud, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted transition for Carbel Group’s operations. The project began in August 2022 and concluded on February 22, 2023, with all applications and servers migrated to AWS.
The main challenge of the implementation was related to site-to-site connection. Carbel, which was designed for a VPC in Northern Virginia, needed multiple VPN connections in all locations of its headquarters and stores, totaling over 50 sites. Due to the high number of private connections, a FortiGate-VM solution on AWS implemented on the EC2 platform was chosen.
A crucial part of this migration was the upgrade of the legacy Microsoft SQL Server from 2016 to a more modern and secure version, Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on the EC2 platform, with total management of the operating system layer by the client and enjoying the best benefits of the Cloud with multi-service integrations. This upgrade was designed to meet critical pillars of agility, security, and availability, ensuring that Carbel Group could manage its data more efficiently and with greater protection against threats. In the pre-migration phase, Carbel opted, with the assistance of S3 technology, for a FULL backup of the latest SQL database in a manual upload and download process. After bringing the backups of the databases to the new SQL environment on EC2, an asynchronous process was carried out to keep the databases updated until the origin database’s shutdown, moments before GOLIVE, so that the databases between on-premise and AWS were at the same update point. EC2 was already monitored by custom metrics, installed by the ForceOne operations team, which added visualization capability over memory and disk capacity of all SQL server disks.
Carbel, which had an environment dominated by Microsoft workloads, had its applications hosted on the EC2 service, whenever possible, on more updated operating systems. For legacy servers, we chose to maintain the same configuration as the source, through the Application Migration Service, which replicates systems and converts them to EC2. The administrative FileServer, accessed by all locations, was modernized to the FSx service for Windows File Server. Carbel uses the Simple Email Service for sending emails to some applications. Additionally, the Route53 service was implemented for DNS traffic management. Other applications have defined access through the Application Load Balancer for external or internal access. All services are protected by AWS Backup, which records server images and snapshots with extremely satisfactory RTO/RPO. Furthermore, productive EC2 instances are replicated to secondary regions in a Warm Site DR disaster recovery solution.
ForceOne implemented a new StorageGateway service on EC2, which can map file mappings to S3 repositories. Different repositories were mapped for various purposes due to the high cost-benefit of this solution. Additional services were implemented to accommodate modernization in some applications. The main use of this service is to map S3 buckets for backups of production SQL server databases. The idea is to add AWS Backup capability with a minimum possible RPO, using logs recorded at very low intervals in S3.
The adoption of the AWS solution for the initial challenges faced by the Carbel Group resulted in a significant transformation and business benefits. With the successful migration to AWS, software updates and continuous server support were effectively achieved. This not only strengthened the operational stability of the infrastructure but also mitigated risks associated with non-compliance and obsolescence. Furthermore, the agility provided by the new cloud configuration allowed Carbel Group to respond quickly and efficiently to new business demands, providing a solid foundation for continuous innovation. The upgrade of Microsoft SQL Server to the 2019 version was a crucial aspect of this transformation, ensuring a solid foundation for continuous innovation and enabling the Group to face the challenges of the automotive market with confidence and effectiveness.
In the image on the case, an event organized by ForceOne at the “Capitão Leitão” space featured the presentation of the Carbel Group case. From left to right are Tulio Henrique Café Carvalhais, COO of ForceOne; Bruno Moraes, IT Supervisor of the Carbel Group; and Décio Cunha Tavares, IT Director of the Carbel Group.
