Transforming a biotech enterprise: migrating mission-critical technology to Switch Las Vegas

Executive summary

A rapidly growing biotechnology company reached a critical point in the evolution of its technology infrastructure.

For years, the company had operated its core technology environment from privately owned and operated on-premises data centers. Those facilities supported its most critical business functions, including enterprise applications, research and development systems, laboratory and scientific computing environments, databases, storage, identity services, network infrastructure, security platforms, and the systems supporting its global workforce.

As the organization expanded, the limitations of its legacy data center strategy became increasingly apparent. The company was carrying the operational and financial burden of maintaining aging facilities, power and cooling infrastructure, physical security, network connectivity, hardware refresh cycles, and disaster-recovery capabilities, all while its technology requirements continued to grow.

The organization decided to exit its legacy data center footprint and consolidate its core technology infrastructure into the Switch Las Vegas data center campus.

The objective was significantly more ambitious than relocating servers. The company needed to physically transform its infrastructure while maintaining business continuity, protecting critical data, minimizing operational risk, and establishing a technology platform capable of supporting future growth.

Arcellium was selected to lead the technology migration and implementation. Working alongside the client's technology organization, facilities teams, application owners, network and security teams, technology vendors, and Switch, Arcellium designed and executed a comprehensive data center transformation program that moved the company's critical infrastructure from its legacy facilities into the Switch environment.

The result was a modernized, resilient, scalable enterprise infrastructure platform that significantly reduced the operational burden of owning and operating a traditional data center while positioning the company for continued growth.

The business challenge

A data center strategy that no longer matched the business

The biotechnology industry depends on technology infrastructure in ways that extend far beyond conventional corporate IT. Research data, laboratory systems, scientific applications, enterprise applications, databases, collaboration platforms, security systems, manufacturing and operational technologies, and business-critical applications all depend on reliable infrastructure.

For this organization, technology availability was directly connected to its ability to conduct research, operate its business, collaborate globally, and protect highly valuable intellectual property and data.

The existing data centers had served the organization well, but the infrastructure model was becoming increasingly difficult to scale. Several challenges had emerged:

• Aging data center infrastructure
• Increasing power and cooling requirements
• Limited physical space
• Increasing capital expenditures
• Hardware refresh requirements
• Increasing operational complexity
• Multiple infrastructure environments requiring support
• Limited scalability
• Growing business continuity and disaster recovery requirements
• High operational overhead for maintaining physical facilities
• Increasing network and telecommunications costs
• Difficulty rapidly deploying new infrastructure
• Growing security, monitoring, and compliance requirements
• The need to support continued corporate and scientific growth

The organization faced a fundamental strategic question: continue investing millions of dollars in maintaining and expanding privately operated data centers, or move its infrastructure onto a purpose-built enterprise colocation platform?

The decision was to transform.

The strategic decision

Moving the company's technology infrastructure to Switch Las Vegas

The company selected Switch's Las Vegas campus as the new physical home for its core infrastructure. The decision was an opportunity to fundamentally change how the organization consumed data center infrastructure. Instead of owning and operating the physical environment, the company could concentrate its resources on the technology running inside the facility.

Switch provides the physical infrastructure, including power, cooling, physical security, and the data center environment, while the customer retains control of its servers, storage, networking equipment, applications, and data.

Switch's Las Vegas campus combines resilient infrastructure, physical security, high-density capabilities, telecommunications connectivity, and scalability designed for enterprise and mission-critical environments. Switch currently describes the campus as supporting high-density deployments and providing 5 ms connectivity to Los Angeles. That proximity was particularly important for an organization with significant operations and users on the West Coast.

Why Switch Las Vegas?

The migration gave the company access to infrastructure capabilities that would have been difficult and expensive to replicate in its own facilities.

Resilient power infrastructure

Mission-critical biotech systems require infrastructure designed around availability. Switch advertises a 100% power uptime guarantee for its Las Vegas campus. Moving into this environment shifted responsibility for the underlying facility infrastructure away from the internal IT organization while the company kept control of the technology platforms running within it.

Physical security

The new environment also provided enterprise-grade physical security, including a 24x7x365 security presence and a security design intended for mission-critical infrastructure. This mattered for a biotechnology company protecting valuable intellectual property, research data, and business-critical systems.

Scalability

The legacy data centers imposed physical constraints on growth. Every major expansion required consideration of floor space, electrical capacity, cooling capacity, rack availability, network connectivity, physical security, facilities engineering, and capital investment.

The Switch environment changed that equation. The organization could provision additional cabinets, power, network connectivity, and infrastructure as requirements evolved, rather than designing its growth strategy around the limits of an existing corporate facility.

Connectivity and geographic strategy

A strategic location for a West Coast enterprise

Location was a major component of the architectural decision. The Las Vegas campus provides low-latency connectivity to Southern California, with Switch citing approximately 5 ms latency to Los Angeles. That allowed the company to establish its primary infrastructure environment outside its legacy facilities while keeping responsive connectivity to its West Coast operations.

The Switch ecosystem also provides access to multiple telecommunications and network service providers, creating options for WAN, Internet, transport, MPLS, IP, SIP, and SD-WAN connectivity. For the biotech company, this supported a broader transformation of its network architecture rather than a simple relocation of servers.

The Arcellium difference

Turning a data center move into a technology transformation

Moving hundreds, or potentially thousands, of technology assets from one data center to another is not a logistics exercise. It is an enterprise transformation program. Every application, network path, database, storage system, security control, monitoring platform, authentication service, and integration must be accounted for. A single overlooked dependency can cause a business-impacting outage.

Arcellium served as the technology transformation partner responsible for turning the company's strategic objective into a detailed, executable migration program. Rather than treating the project as a series of equipment moves, Arcellium developed an end-to-end strategy:

Assess → Design → Plan → Build → Validate → Migrate → Test → Stabilize → Decommission

Phase 1: Discovery and assessment

Arcellium began by building a comprehensive understanding of the existing environment. The team inventoried and assessed:

• Compute infrastructure
• Physical and virtual servers
• Storage platforms
• Databases
• Network infrastructure
• Firewalls
• Load balancers
• WAN connectivity
• Internet connectivity
• Security infrastructure
• Identity services
• Monitoring platforms
• Backup systems
• Management platforms
• Application dependencies
• Physical rack layouts
• Power requirements
• Network connections
• Interdependencies between systems

The objective was to answer a fundamental question: what does the business actually depend upon, and what would happen if it were moved? Arcellium used the answers to establish the migration baseline and identify critical dependencies before any equipment was physically relocated.

Phase 2: Target architecture

Arcellium then developed the target infrastructure architecture within the Switch environment. The design incorporated:

• New rack layouts
• Power distribution
• Network architecture
• WAN connectivity
• Internet connectivity
• Security zones
• Firewall architecture
• Server infrastructure
• Storage infrastructure
• Backup infrastructure
• Monitoring
• Environmental monitoring
• Management networks
• Out-of-band management
• Remote access
• Physical security
• Disaster recovery considerations
• Application connectivity
• Cloud connectivity

The architecture was designed not merely to reproduce the legacy environment but to improve it. Where appropriate, legacy infrastructure was consolidated, redesigned, virtualized, modernized, or eliminated.

Phase 3: Migration planning

One of the most important parts of the program was a migration strategy that minimized business disruption. Arcellium created detailed runbooks defining:

• Migration waves
• Application dependencies
• System shutdown procedures
• Equipment transportation
• Rack installation
• Network connections
• Power sequencing
• Startup procedures
• Application validation
• Testing requirements
• Rollback procedures
• Business-owner approvals
• Maintenance windows
• Communications
• Post-migration monitoring

Critical systems were grouped into logical migration waves based on business dependencies and technical complexity. This turned a potentially chaotic data center move into a controlled series of executable migration events.

Phase 4: Build and staging

Before production migration began, Arcellium coordinated the physical and technical build-out of the Switch environment:

• Rack and cabinet preparation
• Power distribution
• Structured cabling
• Network installation
• Firewall deployment
• Server deployment
• Storage deployment
• Connectivity implementation
• Equipment labeling
• Asset validation
• Network testing
• Configuration validation
• Monitoring implementation

Whenever practical, equipment was prepared and validated before it entered production migration windows. This reduced the amount of unknown risk during the actual cutover.

Phase 5: Network transformation

The network was one of the most critical components of the migration. The objective was not simply to connect the new data center to the corporate WAN. Arcellium engineered the connectivity required for the Switch facility to function as the company's new primary technology hub.

The network architecture incorporated appropriate redundancy, routing, security controls, Internet connectivity, WAN connectivity, and remote access. Connectivity to corporate offices, remote locations, cloud services, business partners, and external applications was validated as part of the program. The result was a network designed around the new operating model rather than the limits of the legacy data centers.

Phase 6: Application and infrastructure migration

With the target environment ready, Arcellium coordinated the migration of the company's core infrastructure. Migration waves included:

• Compute: physical servers, virtualization platforms, application servers, infrastructure servers
• Storage: SAN/NAS platforms, enterprise storage, backup repositories, replication systems
• Network: core switching, distribution switching, edge infrastructure, firewalls, load balancing, WAN connectivity
• Enterprise services: Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, authentication, monitoring, management, backup, security tooling
• Business applications: ERP, financial systems, collaboration platforms, enterprise databases, research systems, laboratory applications, data analytics, business intelligence, file and data services

Each wave followed a controlled sequence of preparation, shutdown, relocation or replication, startup, validation, application testing, and business acceptance.

Protecting business continuity

For a biotechnology organization, downtime is not simply an IT inconvenience. An outage can interrupt research, laboratory operations, collaboration, financial processes, supply-chain activities, and other business-critical functions. Arcellium therefore built the migration around a central principle:

The business should experience the transformation, not the disruption.

Migration activities were scheduled around business requirements and approved maintenance windows. Critical applications received additional validation, and rollback procedures were developed for major migration events. Technical teams and application owners worked together to validate functionality after each migration.

Security and compliance

The migration also created an opportunity to strengthen the organization's infrastructure security model. Arcellium incorporated security considerations throughout the architecture and migration lifecycle, including:

• Network segmentation
• Firewall policy validation
• Secure management networks
• Access controls
• Identity and authentication
• Monitoring
• Logging
• Backup protection
• Physical security
• Remote access controls
• Infrastructure hardening
• Security validation

Rather than recreating the legacy security architecture, Arcellium used the migration to identify and address architectural weaknesses.

The business transformation

The completed migration fundamentally changed the company's infrastructure operating model.

The physical data center became an infrastructure service rather than an organizational burden.

Business benefits

Reduced capital investment

The company no longer needed to continuously invest in expanding and modernizing its own data center facilities. Capital that would have gone to facility infrastructure could be directed toward technology initiatives more closely aligned with business growth.

Improved infrastructure resilience

The Switch environment provided a purpose-built foundation with resilient power, physical security, connectivity, and scalable capacity. This materially changed the company's risk profile compared with maintaining a traditional corporate data center.

Greater scalability

The company gained the ability to expand its infrastructure without first expanding the physical data center. This was particularly important for a growing biotechnology organization whose compute, storage, and data requirements could increase rapidly.

Improved connectivity

The Switch ecosystem provided multiple connectivity options and low-latency connectivity to major West Coast markets, giving the company more flexibility in designing its WAN, Internet, cloud, and business-partner connectivity.

Reduced operational complexity

Responsibility for the underlying facility environment shifted to a specialized data center operator. Instead of maintaining generators, cooling systems, physical security systems, and facility infrastructure, the technology organization could focus on the systems that directly supported the business.

Geographic risk reduction

Moving the primary infrastructure to Nevada provided geographic separation from the legacy facilities and access to a region that Switch identifies as having a relatively low natural-disaster risk. This strengthened the broader business-continuity architecture.

Improved sustainability

Switch states that its North American data centers operate on 100% renewable energy, giving organizations an opportunity to align infrastructure strategy with corporate sustainability objectives. For organizations with increasingly important ESG goals, the data center strategy becomes part of the broader sustainability strategy.

Nevada economic advantages

Depending on the organization's eligibility and structure, Nevada's data center tax incentives can also provide economic benefits. Switch identifies a potential 2% use-tax treatment for qualifying data center equipment and a 75% reduction in local business personal-property tax for qualifying colocated businesses. These considerations can materially influence the total cost of ownership of a large infrastructure deployment.

Arcellium's role

More than a migration partner

The success of the transformation depended on more than moving hardware. Arcellium provided the program leadership, technical architecture, engineering coordination, migration planning, implementation discipline, and execution needed to turn a complex strategic initiative into an operational environment. Arcellium served as the bridge between:

1. Business strategy
2. Technology strategy
3. Infrastructure architecture
4. Data center design
5. Network and security
6. Application dependencies
7. Physical migration
8. Business validation
9. Operational handover

That integration was critical. Without a coordinated approach, each technical team could complete its own task while the overall migration still failed. Arcellium ensured the individual components operated as one integrated transformation program.

The result

The biotechnology company successfully moved its core technology infrastructure from its legacy on-site data centers into the Switch Las Vegas environment. The transformation delivered a modern infrastructure foundation designed to support its next phase of growth. The organization gained:

• A scalable data center platform
• Enterprise-grade physical infrastructure
• Improved resilience
• Enhanced connectivity
• Greater geographic flexibility
• Reduced facility-management burden
• Improved operational efficiency
• A platform for future technology modernization

Most importantly, the company moved away from the operational constraints of owning its own data center infrastructure and toward a model built around flexibility, scalability, and business enablement.

A strategic infrastructure transformation

The migration demonstrated that a data center exit does not have to be simply a facilities project. Approached strategically, it can become an opportunity to fundamentally improve an organization's technology architecture. For this biotechnology enterprise, the move to Switch Las Vegas created the physical foundation for that transformation, and Arcellium was instrumental in making it happen.

From initial assessment and architecture through engineering, staging, migration, validation, and operational stabilization, Arcellium provided the expertise and execution required to transform a complex, business-critical environment while maintaining continuity for the organization it supported.

The result was more than a successful data center migration. It was a transformation of the company's technology operating model, creating a more resilient, scalable, connected, and future-ready foundation for the business.