"The method was drawn up but we had to convince AXA Life Japan, and myself at the same time that it would work; being unproven we did a few dry runs with differing degrees of failure and success."

The data was piped across the AXA Life 45Mb VPN WAN link after being tweaked with A WAN accelerator tool from Juniper enabling FTP throughput of between 10-12MBps -- over one long weekend when around 1.4Tb was transferred. At times the FTP acceleration reached speeds of 20GB an hour.

Less than 100 servers are still located in Shirokane, Japan. The system is now completely live.

Brindley said the ability to migrate remotely over the WAN without needing to be in physical contact with source and target servers saved months of work.