The Challenges of Running a Monolithic Multi-terabyte Data Warehouse
Are you still soldiering on with your data warehouse on a traditional, general-purpose, monolithic, relational database (RDBMS) platform like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM DB2? Maybe you still have a legacy data monolithic data warehouse appliance like IBM’s Netezza or Microsoft’s Analytics Platform System (APS/PDW)?
Since you started out on your enterprise data warehouse journey, your business has grown as have your business’s ambitions for data and expectations of your data platform. Your initial reporting data warehouse you built for one part of the business has grown organically into a multi-terabyte enterprise data warehouse with data volumes, data sources, query complexity, and query volumes growing rapidly.
The stress of constant firefights just to keep your monolithic data warehouse architecture running is overwhelming you and your team, and the business is screaming blue murder. Your inability to run the analytics they need means the business uses the data warehouse as a glorified data extraction tool, spinning up multiple copies of the data in different technologies to actually get useful work done, increasing the overall cost and complexity of analytics, and storing up even more challenges for the future.
You hear all the noise around data mesh, data fabrics, and data lakes. You’d love to investigate and experiment with modern alternatives to your monolithic data warehouse architecture, but just standing still is keeping your team busy enough.
You went to battle with your CIO and Finance and tried adding scale and moving to bigger hardware with more processors and memory, but the gains were not proportionate to the cost and effort. Your existing vendor is so focussed on cloud growth it’s hard to get them to help you. In any case, RDBMS vendors haven’t updated their best practices for large-scale data warehouses for several years. You face daily battles to keep the data warehouse running smoothly. It’s Midday and your ETL and integration tasks are still getting in the way of critical business workloads, impacting staff productivity, and impacting customer service.
To try and deliver a decent service to your business you may even have tried to build accelerator data marts using lower cost, or open source vendors like MySQL or PostgreSQL or implemented OLAP cubes and caches. These all added more layers of fragility and complexity for your team to manage.
Does this sound familiar?
Can a Cloud Data Warehouse Fix Your On-premises Data Warehouse Challenges?
Everyone’s telling you that you need to move the cloud to meet data demands and drive data innovation. You already know that simply lifting and shifting your RDBMS or appliance to the cloud delivers you no gain. Moving a multi-terabyte data warehouse to the public cloud with all the associated integration tasks and connected applications can seem truly daunting. Your team needs time to develop new skills and best practices, and managing variable costs throw up even more challenges. Whichever way you cut the business case, the projected ROI payback is several years out, while you face real budgetary pressures and business demands for analytics today.
Most cloud data warehouse solutions only offer a one-way ticket to a 100% cloud. Of course, here at Yellowbrick, we can also help you go straight to a cloud data warehouse too. There are tools to simplify the move, but the number of moving parts makes for a complex program of work with many dependencies. Think about all the interfaces, BI reports, connected spreadsheets, ETL tools, and data extracts that have built up over the years.
A Hybrid Cloud Data Warehouse Could Give You Room to Breathe
Yellowbrick’s hybrid capabilities give you another option – migrate with lower effort and change from your existing on-prem data warehouse to a modern high-performance, massively parallel processing (MPP) on-prem Yellowbrick Data Warehouse. Immediately boost productivity, slash software license and support fees, and eliminate hardware maintenance. Our super-efficient database engine means more work gets done using less hardware. Hardware comes pre-built, pre-installed, and is up and running in hours. The familiar SQL database interface that mimics standard PostgreSQL means minimal re-training and minimal re-development. Tried and tested automated approaches mean migration can be reasonably straightforward with automation taking most of the heavy lift, even for testing.
Now you’ve quickly delivered game-changing performance, the stress has abated, and you are no longer constantly firefighting. When you need more capacity simply expand by adding nodes without any disruption.
And now your warehouse is on Yellowbrick, moving data workloads to the cloud just got even easier. Switch on our built-in replication. Move as much of your data and workloads to Yellowbrick in the cloud as you need. Since the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse works identically both on-prem and in public cloud, you’ve essentially eliminated the cloud migration challenge. Even our pricing is the same on-prem and in the cloud.
Dip your toe in the cloud, use it for DR, use it for development and testing, use it for net new workloads, or keep growing on-prem – with Yellowbrick the direction and pace are yours to define.
