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Azure File Storage

Meet Cloud Sync, the Muscle Behind Cloud Migration

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August 21, 2019

Topics: Azure NetApp Files 3 minute read

Jessica couldn’t believe it. She’d gone out for a long walk, even grabbed a long lunch, because her modeling application had been loading outrageously slow, and her patience had grown thin. She had hoped that by the time she returned, she’d be able to continue working on her analysis. But now her break was finished, and her application process was not. Jessica knew right then that this slow-loading problem needed to be addressed immediately. It was just too much.

PLM Low Latency on AWS

Jessica works for an automobile company in Northern Europe that started to roll out its cloud-first strategy quite a while ago. When they first migrated to the public cloud, they expected operating expenditures (opex) to decrease dramatically. They believed that they would be able to reactively scale their cloud environment without meaningful lags. And they considered those expectations to be, well, reasonable.  

Unfortunately, they found that AWS was too slow for their business demands. The entire organization was dealing with issues from a slow product lifecycle management (PLM) application, which housed more than 200TB of data. Not something you’d want running slowly.

The organization had been using AWS to host their applications using a combination of Amazon EBS and S3, but the PLM showed enormous storage latency, rendering it more or less unusable.

Cloud Sync Saves Cloud Migration

Angie, the company’s head cloud architect, was looking for solutions to the PLM problem in AWS. While she was sifting through options, Angie had to consider their current protocol. They had been running AWS using S3 object storage. Amazon S3 had high response times that varied widely, making it unattractive. As a result, she left object storage and moved her data to NFS-based file storage. She settled on Azure NetApp Files (ANF) as the best home for their data. Azure NetApp Files responds in 1-5 milliseconds, consistently, depending upon the performance level you choose.  ANF was quick and consistent (and feature-rich, but that’s another story) and that’s just what Angie needed. 

Now, it’s not typical to move a PLM from one cloud platform to another in less than a week; it’s generally been far more challenging than a few clicks of the mouse. But NetApp’s products have deep integrations with Azure through ANF that make a rapid migration to the cloud possible; one of the most crucial is Cloud Sync, a software as a service (SaaS) product that offers secure, fast, and automated data synchronization between cloud and/or on-premises environments. Through Cloud Sync, Angie’s company was able to move the 200TB of files and applications previously hosted on AWS to Azure NetApp Files, seamlessly.

Cloud Sync Streamlines Cloud-to-Cloud Movement

Angie’s company has now moved into the proof-of-concept stage with ANF. Their migration to the new public cloud was rapid: they moved about 1GB per second from S3 to ANF, transferring, in total, over 200TB of data in just four days. That migration has allowed Jessica to resume her work with new gusto (and her usual diligence), since the PLM is now running faster. The organization can continue to make headway in building its cloud strategy with Azure NetApp Files.

High Latency Applications Making You Feel Fatigued?

Register for Azure NetApp Files, and pick up the pace in no time.

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