LensDirect + Pulse Health Migrate to AWS
Pulse Health is a U.S.-based life sciences tech company delivering cloud-based engagement tools for healthcare marketing, serving clients across the biotech and
pharmaceutical sectors. LensDirect, headquartered in New York, is an online vision care retailer offering contact lenses, glasses, virtual try-ons, and lens replacements to consumers across North America.
Facing an imminent 40% increase in VMware licensing costs following Broadcom’s acquisition, Pulse Health and LensDirect partnered with Opti9 to migrate their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The migration transformed their fixed-capacity, hardware-dependent environment into a flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure while avoiding substantial licensing cost increases.
Looming 40% VMWare Licensing Increase
Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, they faced a substantial cost hike that threatened their IT budget.
Hardware-Bound Scalability
Adding capacity required purchasing new hardware, creating a capital-intensive growth model.
Fixed Resources
The ESXi hosts provided limited capacity that couldn’t easily scale with business demands.
Rising Operational Burden
Managing aging infrastructure and the complexities of on-premise hardware consumed valuable IT resources.
Lack of Cost Transparency
Difficulty in forecasting and optimizing IT budget.
Regardless of your specific needs, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the flexibility to migrate, modernize, and optimize virtualized environments at your own pace, using pathways that make sense for your business. Get started with a lift-and-shift approach to swiftly transition to AWS, then re-architect your solutions to leverage AI, serverless computing, and other emerging technologies to accelerate cloud migration.
The Solution
Opti9 developed a comprehensive AWS migration strategy that
included:
- Implementing a secure multi-account AWS architecture with production, staging, and shared services environment)
- Migrating and rightsizing over 60 servers across both business unit
- Deploying auto-scaling capabilities for web application
- Implementing modern security controls with WAF and CloudFront
- Setting up AWS Backup and SSM Patch Manager for enhanced protection
- Delivered ongoing managed cloud services and multi-region disaster recovery to minimize downtime from outages or cyberattacks.
Avoiding Cost Increases While Gaining Flexibility
The migration delivered significant benefits:
VMware Cost Avoidance: Escaped the 40% VMware licensing increase while maintaining comparable IT spending
AWS Funding Support: Over $10k of implementation costs were offset through AWS funding programs
Enhanced Flexibility: Gained the ability to scale resources up and down as needed, eliminating hardware refreshes
Improved Visibility: Clear insights into resource utilization enabled optimized spending
Reduced Management Overhead: Opti9 s CloudOps service handles
maintenance, security, and optimization.
Benefits
Pulse Health and LensDirect are working with Opti9 on several forward-looking initiatives:
Database Modernization: Already completed the transition from self-managed RDS databases to Amazon Aurora for improved performance, scalability, and reduced management overhead.
Messaging Service Modernization: Exploring managed Kafka services to replace RabbitMQ, enhancing scalability and reliability of their messaging infrastructure.
Serverless Architecture: Implementing AWS Lambda to enable event-driven, serverless computing that further reduces infrastructure management needs and improves scalability.
Infrastructure as Code: Building all new infrastructure using Terraform, ensuring consistent, repeatable deployments and enabling DevOps best practices.
With Opti9’s ongoing CloudOps support and AWS expertise, These initiatives represent the next phase in their cloud journey, focused on leveraging native AWS services to further reduce operational overhead while increasing agility, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Customer Testimonial
“I highly recommend Opti9’s CloudOps service as they help with some of the heavy lifting around ongoing maintenance of our services, disaster recovery, and keeping our tech stack modern. Their AWS expertise and commitment to best practices made them the
ideal partner for our cloud journey.
Big thanks to our long-time partner, Opti9 Tech for their incredible support in helping us successfully migrate our entire infrastructure to AWS. Their expertise and collaboration have been invaluable every step of the way!”
–Robert Reynolds
Chief Technology Officer, LensDirect
