In the dynamic landscape of rapidly expanding businesses, the migration to cloud environments has emerged as a pivotal strategy. This transition not only facilitates access to cutting-edge capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) but also provides a versatile platform for swiftly scaling enterprises and catering to rapidly growing customer bases.

Established in 1972, Public Storage has evolved into the largest owner and operator of self-storage facilities globally. With thousands of locations across the U.S. and Europe, and over 170 million net rentable square feet of real estate, it has solidified its position as a leader in the self-storage industry for nearly five decades. With a strong customer focus and significant presence in major markets, Public Storage continues to innovate to meet evolving demands.

Public Storage embarked on a transformative journey in partnership with SELECCION to migrate from Rackspace On-Prem to Google Cloud. Following meticulous assessment and planning by SELECCION, execution commenced in late 2022, culminating in a seamless migration and decommissioning of on-prem servers within approximately six months.

SELECCION orchestrated the migration of over 200 on-premises servers, more than 450 SQL databases, and over 300TB of storage to Google Cloud, ensuring zero service disruption to Public Storage's customers while maintaining PCI compliance. The migration strategy prioritized lifting and shifting applications and VMs, with physical servers being virtualized at the source and migrated through M2VM. High Availability SQL Servers were seamlessly migrated using AG geo-replication.

For networking and security, SELECCION deployed a robust infrastructure including Palo Alto machines for VPN, firewall, and SD-WAN, Velo-Cloud SDWAN, Okta, GCP Firewall, and the Security Command Center. Backup solutions like Commvault, Google Backup, and DR were implemented, alongside Delphix for data replication and Datadog for infrastructure monitoring.

The impact of the migration was immediate, with requests for scaling RAM, CPU, and storage fulfilled almost instantly compared to the days of waiting experienced with on-prem infrastructure. This newfound agility enables Public Storage to rapidly scale its environment to accommodate new acquisitions and sustain its growth trajectory.

Despite the successes, challenges arose during the migration process. Limitations in the number of learned routes for unique destinations per region in GCP posed a hurdle for SD-WAN deployments, hindering communication with over 1,500 properties nationwide. SELECCION proposed a strategic solution involving the deployment of Palo Altos to expand the learned route quota, enabling efficient and secure communication with all properties.

Another challenge surfaced during the migration of databases from physical on-premises servers to VMs in GCP, where disks were maxing out available throughput/IOPS, leading to performance lags. By swiftly converting SSDs to Extreme disks, SELECCION doubled the throughput and IOPS, resulting in a 20% increase in performance for users, with queries and jobs running significantly faster than before.

The success of Public Storage's cloud migration journey, facilitated by SELECCION, not only ensures enhanced agility, scalability, and performance but also lays the foundation for future modernization initiatives, including the adoption of fully managed database services, containerization of workloads, advanced analytics, and next-generation AI tools.

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