Snam: Together with Microsoft, the integration between on-premises and the public cloud is effortless

Snam has been listed on the Italian stock market since 2001 and is a leading European operator in natural gas transport and storage, with an infrastructure capable of providing the transition to hydrogen. It operates a pipeline network of approximately 41,000 kilometers spanning Italy, Austria, France, Greece, and the United Kingdom and manages 3.5 percent of the world’s gas storage capacity. It ranks among the top 10 Italian listed companies by market capitalization. With more than 80 years of experience in the management and development of networks and plants, Snam guarantees the security and diversification of supply and promotes the energy transition in Italy. In addition to transportation and storage, Snam is also one of the leading operators in the regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The company is also active in Asia and the Middle East.

Approximately 3,500 people currently work at Snam. The company manages over 20 large plants, including natural gas storage, regasification, and compression sites.

“The vast digital transformation program launched by Snam a year ago,” says Giorgio Veronesi, Senior Vice President of ICT Infrastructure at Snam, “is part of an even broader innovation project called SnamTEC—where TEC stands for Tomorrow’s Energy Company—intended to guide the company in the demanding ecological and energy transition, towards the use of sustainable sources such as biomethane and hydrogen. To achieve this goal, Snam is renovating physical as well as digital infrastructures, and the two paths must obviously run parallel to each other.”

A seamless integration between on-premises and the cloud

One of the many challenges that Snam faced in the complex digital transformation process was bringing a significant portion of the workload to the public cloud. The company’s IT infrastructure has a total of approximately 4,700 virtual servers, 800 physical servers, and 1,300 databases. Added to this are over 9,000 corporate mobile devices supplied to technicians and employees. Services are provided by three different datacenters: two primary proprietary centers and one virtual center built with Microsoft Azure.

To support Snam’s growth, however, IT had to design an infrastructure capable of tripling the available storage space in five years, from the current 4 petabytes to the 12 petabytes expected in 2026; 100 percent workload growth is also expected over the same time period, which poses a major cost, management, and security challenge.

“The only way to support this growth in a safe and economically sustainable way was the cloud,” says Veronesi, “and when it was time to plan the migration of a portion of the loads virtualized with VMware to the public cloud, we identified three different strategies: (1) implement a traditional migration by moving virtual machines from on-premises to the cloud; (2) keep virtual machines as is within datacenters and implement all new workloads on the cloud; or (3) use a VMware virtualization layer that would enable us to implement a true hybrid cloud. The first hypothesis was discarded because it would have required a complex analysis of the impact on applications; the second was also discarded because it did not go in the direction of a true path to the cloud.”

VMware on Azure is the winning formula

Azure VMware Solution was identified as the ideal option: it allows a painless transition of a portion of the workloads (initially those that are less “core”) to the public cloud and enables the company to plan a safe and economically sustainable journey to also carry other services and applications on Azure in the future.

“Our goal was to transfer the workloads to the cloud quickly with no backlash,” says Veronesi, “and it was a perfect hit. We wanted to get the equivalent of a virtual datacenter where we can move applications whenever convenient. Thanks to Azure VMware Solution, we were able to migrate workloads—hundreds of virtual machines—without having to change hardly anything and without reconfiguring the subnets. None of the users of the migrated applications noticed anything.”

With Azure VMware Solution, Snam was able to migrate over 400 virtual machines and about 160 database requests in a few weeks, integrating them successfully with on-premises resources. In addition to security and cost requirements, Snam’s IT managed to meet two other fundamental needs: transparency, such as the possibility of transferring loads to and from the cloud with no interruption, and specificity, such as the possibility of efficiently building cloud-native applications.

“I can definitely say that Azure—and in particular Azure VMware Solution—is the right solution for us,” says Veronesi. “It allows us to seamlessly move from on-premises to the cloud, thereby freeing up resources and capital investments that can be used where they are needed more. IT management has also improved: on-premises infrastructures had to be managed and updated to ensure security, things that we no longer have to do with the cloud, thus freeing us up to focus on project development. But the thing we like most about Azure are the availability zones: by configuring our systems based on these zones, we can achieve high reliability without having to resort to new datacenters.”

Migration does not stop

Snam’s migration is a step-by-step project, which involves the gradual shifting of workloads to the cloud, pursuing the optimization of a hybrid configuration to ensure security, scalability, and performance.

“After completing the transition of the first 800 virtual machines by the end of 2022,” says Veronesi, “we will complete the configuration of the infrastructure to achieve high reliability. We will then continue the job in the following years, gradually migrating even the most strategic workloads and those that are currently under business continuity.”

Snam also plans an even more massive use of other Microsoft technologies in the future, such as those related to Azure Synapse for AI and Big Data, a pillar of the company’s strategy, and those that refer to edge infrastructures, such as Azure Stack HCI, to bring intelligence and calculation skills even to the periphery.