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Databases are home to companies’ most prized possession—data. Migrating that data to a cloud-based database, such as an AWS database, can be incredibly worthwhile, helping to consolidate data sets into a single shareable and scalable resource. However, migration itself can be challenging, and once replicated in the cloud, databases must be highly available, secured, manageable, recoverable, and performant.
In this blog post we demonstrate how Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports the migration and operation of databases in the cloud through several customer success stories.
Optimizing Cloud Databases with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Concerto Cloud: SQL Cost Reductions on AWS
Concerto Cloud Services is a fully managed cloud provider that offers its clients a customizable hybrid cloud platform. It is an expert in seamlessly deploying enterprise applications across on-premises, public cloud, and in third-party environments.
The company manages both large on-premises data centers and resources in the cloud. With a large footprint in the cloud, Concerto Cloud was looking for a way to reduce its cloud database storage costs and increase manageability to help their customers navigate multicloud environments.
The cloud provider used Cloud Volumes ONTAP to migrate 800 SQL databases to AWS. By using Cloud Volumes ONTAP it gained considerable benefits including:
- Reduced database costs and optimized storage structure through data tiering.
- 96% data reduction with Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s storage efficiencies.
- Its customers can switch between private and public clouds on demand.
- Gained confidence in meeting its customers’ existing and future requirements.
For more information, take a look at the full database case study here.
Learn more about SQL in AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP Managed Storage here.
Mellanox: MongoDB Data Consolidation and Cost Reduction on Azure
Mellanox is a global supplier of high-performance computer networking products that use InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Its product portfolio provides low latency and fast data throughput to accelerate data centers and applications. Its solutions include cables, switches, processors, silicon, and network adaptors.
Mellanox manages data systems on-premises in factories all over the world. These data centers weren’t adequately built to scale and did not support the performance and reliability metrics needed to meet the company’s desired rate of product innovation. To tackle this problem, Mellanox searched for a solution that could consolidate its siloed on-premises production data sets.
The company applied Cloud Volumes ONTAP on Azure to unify the data in their cloud-based MongoDB database which contained production logs as well as other production data. As a result Mellanox experienced the following benefits:
- Data from its factories around the world were unified into one scalable, shareable, reliable and cost-effective platform.
- Infrequently-used data was offloaded to Azure Blob storage with data tiering, so only fresh, high-demand data is kept on their SSDs.
- 90% of backup and disaster recovery cold data was tiered to lower-cost object storage.
- 69% reduction in production data footprint and costs using Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s data deduplication technology.
For more information, take a look at the full case study here.
Learn more about NoSQL database deployment with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
AdvancedMD: SQL “Lift and Shift” Migration to AWS
The Utah-based company provides a suite of integrated SaaS cloud-based tools for medical practices. Catering to 26,000 practitioners across 8,600 practices, its portfolio includes telemedicine, patient relationship management, practice management, business analytics and benchmarking, and electronic health records.
AdvancedMD needed to branch away from its parent company’s data center and establish their own data center in the cloud within a very short time period. To solve this problem, it began using Cloud Volumes ONTAP to enhance its SQL database management on AWS, and gained:
- Easy lift and shift of their sensitive data into AWS to form their own data center.
- Boosted SQL database performance and database storage management.
- Quick access and recovery of customer data and their application stack.
- Set up an easy file management system without changing their existing processes.
For more information, take a look at the database case study here.
Business and Financial Software Company: Hadoop Data Lakes and Oracle on AWS
This US-based business and financial software company provides small businesses with financial, accounting, and tax preparation software. Its flagship solutions process 25% of the United States GDP and 40% of the United States taxes.
The company decided to adopt a cloud-only strategy, migrating to AWS completely by the end of 2020. To achieve this goal it needed a way to migrate its large Hadoop environment to AWS. Using NetApp Cloud Sync Service, the company migrated PBs of Hadoop data lakes from on-premises NFS to AWS S3, and can now also replicate its Oracle database from on-premises to AWS RDS and between different AWS regions.
Applying Cloud Volumes ONTAP to its production workloads led to additional benefits:
- Centralized management with NetApp Cloud Manager.
- High Availability across availability zones with RPO=0 and RTO < 60.
- Reduced database costs with storage efficiencies.
Learn more about Oracle database in AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP Managed Storage here.
Online Fashion and Cosmetics Retailer: Seamless Migration of Oracle to Azure
This British online fashion and cosmetic retailer owns its own brand of clothing and accessories and also sells over 850 additional brands. With more than 3500 employees worldwide, the company ships its merchandise to over 200 countries from centers in the UK, US and Europe.
The retailer decided to transition to a cloud-only strategy and was in need of a storage platform that could support its mission-critical Oracle Retail stack deployment in Azure. It selected Cloud Volumes ONTAP for the job and gained:
- Simple implementation of the Oracle stack in Azure.
- Heightened manageability of its Oracle database.
- Enhanced disaster recovery capabilities in both local and full regional failure scenarios.
Learn more about Oracle database in Azure with Cloud Volumes ONTAP Managed Storage here.
Multinational Retail Corporation: Quick and Easy Migration of SAP HANA to Azure
This major American retailer operates several branded retail chains globally, making it one of the largest companies in the world. A family business that’s publicly traded, its workforce numbers in the millions.
The retail giant operates under a hybrid cloud strategy with Azure and Google Cloud, and needed a disaster recovery solution for its SAP HANA database in Azure. It turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP for this and achieved:
- Easy and quick replication of SAP HANA data and services in Azure using SnapMirror® technology.
- Seamless and automatic disaster recovery solution for SAP HANA in the cloud.
- In light of these successes, additional workloads are scheduled to be migrated to Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Fujitsu: VMware Cloud on AWS for SQL Workloads
A leader in its field, the multinational information technology company Fujitsu delivers managed services and system integration to enterprises worldwide. Its clients’ deployments are spread out across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid architectures. Even when leveraging the cloud’s scalable resources, Fujitsu must still tackle the major challenge of keeping expenses and complexity at bay.
One of Fujitsu’s customers, a large financial organization, was driving up costs with a sizable VMware Cloud on AWS deployment for their SQL workloads. Fujitsu turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP to lower its storage costs and gained numerous benefits:
- Data loss prevention and no downtime with dual-instance configuration across AZs for SQL data and logs and secondary DR copies.
- The client’s expenses were reduced by $3 million, with a 30% reduction of the number of hosts required.
- Costs were minimized even further with Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s storage efficiency features and data tiering.
For more information, check out our blog on this case study.
Conclusion
Databases are the home bases for data, which is often a company's most important asset. Whether you are using SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, Hadoop, MongoDB, or any other environment, databases are essential to running operations and applications.
As data piles up, transferring databases to the scalable cloud can dramatically free up storage space, improve performance, help consolidate disparate data centers, and lower database costs. However, this shift requires having an efficient method with which to mirror the database in the cloud. It also entails making sure the database is secure, performant, manageable, recoverable and highly available.
Looking at these database case studies, we see that many companies are using Cloud Volumes ONTAP to seamlessly migrate any type of database to the cloud and as a result have reaped numerous benefits. These include reduced data footprint, automated disaster recovery, high availability, and heightened manageability. Building on NetApp’s suite of tools and technologies, Cloud Volumes ONTAP simplifies the migration of databases and ensures they get the most out of what the public cloud has to offer.
