CLIENT SNAPSHOT
A business-critical archive migration with no room for disruption
Engagement at a glance
Industry
Energy / Oil and Gas
Region
Middle East
Client
Fortune 500 energy producer
Reciprocal offering
Enterprise Vault Migration
SourceOne to Enterprise Vault
A Fortune 500 energy company operating across the Middle East needed to protect the long-term integrity of critical business communications and archived data across upstream and downstream operations.
Its archive environment supported more than 9,000 users and operated continuously to satisfy operational, regulatory and legal-hold requirements. Reciprocal was engaged to move the organisation from end-of-life SourceOne to Arctera (Veritas) Enterprise Vault while live archiving remained available throughout.
THE CHALLENGE
Retire a failing legacy platform without cutting users off from their archive
SourceOne had reached end-of-life, and declining reliability threatened the viability of the organisation’s enterprise archiving environment. The migration involved hundreds of millions of items in a live production estate with no tolerance for downtime.
A previous migration attempt using another tool had stalled, increasing cost and eroding confidence. Reciprocal first had to prove that the migration could be completed safely, then scale the proven approach across the full environment.
A fixed deadline
SourceOne add-ins were being switched off. Any migration gap risked cutting users off from historical data.
A live production estate
Archiving had to continue 24×7 without overloading or interrupting the target platform.
A fragmented user experience
Running two archive platforms in parallel would increase support overhead and delay SourceOne retirement.
WHY RECIPROCAL
Full ownership, proven delivery and transparent execution
Reciprocal took ownership of the migration as a managed service, removing the burden of tool selection, licensing, specialist resourcing and technical administration from the client’s team.
- Risk proven before scale: successful pilot batches rebuilt confidence before production rollout.
- One accountable delivery team: Reciprocal coordinated issues across SourceOne, Enterprise Vault, migration tooling and SQL.
- Proactive reporting: stakeholders received transparent project updates and clear visibility throughout.
- Regional responsiveness: local Middle East presence enabled fast support and close collaboration.
THE SOLUTION
A fully managed migration engineered around zero disruption
Architecture and project planning were designed to anticipate the variables most likely to derail a live archive migration – not merely react once they appeared.
01
Migrate archived content
Move SourceOne content into Enterprise Vault while preserving archive integrity at scale.
02
Preserve end-user access
Convert shortcuts and restore shortcut bodies in production so users retain access to historical content.
03
Keep archiving live
Maintain continuous 24×7 archiving throughout the migration window with no service interruption.
04
Troubleshoot across the stack
Coordinate source, target, migration tooling and SQL database issues through one delivery team.
THE RESULTS
Enterprise-scale migration performance with no end-user disruption
567M
archived items migrated
171 TB
of archive data moved
< 6 months
from production start to completion
0
downtime to live archiving
0.000001% failure rate
across hundreds of millions of migrated data points
3,268 users unified
Users were supported on the unified Enterprise Vault platform following migration.
Zero end-user impact
Live production archiving continued normally throughout, with full collaboration across the client, Reciprocal and third-party partners.
PROJECT INSIGHT
“One of the most underestimated aspects of any migration is timeline planning and that does not mean setting deadlines. It means understanding everything that could influence them.”
Rineesh Panicker
Senior Service Delivery Engineer – Middle East, Reciprocal
KEY TAKEAWAY
Migration planning is not a deadline. It is a risk model.
The most underestimated aspect of a migration is timeline planning. Success depends on understanding every technical, operational and organisational variable capable of influencing delivery.
Organisations should treat architectural design and proactive risk planning as first-order priorities, not afterthoughts, especially when migrating live, business-critical archive environments.
