Zadara enhances SQL Server database migration to the cloud, removes complexity, hidden risks and expenses

Zadara Storage announced a new solution that enables enterprises to migrate SQL Server database apps to the cloud – in a phased manner. 

High availability (HA) is imperative to a well-architected SQL Server environment and modernizing business-critical applications. 

While Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition provides a mechanism for doing so, it is costly for organizations that only need its HA features. But according to Zadara, it doesn’t have to be this way. Zadara’s hybrid cloud storage platform is available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

Zadara’s service offering allows users to meet their high-availability requirements using SQL Standard Edition within the AWS environment – providing them with the ability to maintain HA without the cost of SQL Enterprise Edition. In addition, applications can be migrated to AWS without any code changes.

“Our newest offering is the latest example of Zadara’s ability to deliver real business value,” said Oded Kellner, vice president, product management at Zadara. “We are helping customers navigate the hidden risks and unnecessary expenses that have plagued so many SQL Server migrations to public clouds – with greater reliability, faster performance and increased security capabilities.”

New HPE multi-national survey shows that 86 percent of IT leaders embrace adoption of as-a-Service

Nearly nine-in-ten (87 percent) IT decision makers (ITDMs) report that their organizations have started to implement as-a-Service (aaS) solutions or have already completed the process, yet seven in ten (71 percent) ITDMs are concerned about keeping up with the changing aaS landscape, according to the HPE “2019 As-a-Service: Driving Change Report”. Furthermore, three-quarters (75 percent) of all ITDMs surveyed expect their organization to move toward full adoption of aaS solutions in less than five years.

The report surveyed over 1,000 ITDMs at companies of all sizes (from 50 employees to 10,000+) across the U.S., Germany and the UK to explore the future opportunities and impact of aaS consumption models. 

“Businesses of all sizes are embracing as-a-Service models to unlock innovation and agility and lead disruption rather than become a victim of it,” said Phil Davis, president of hybrid IT for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As-a-Service elevates the role of IT decision makers, allowing them to become true service brokers who focus on strategic initiatives and revenue growth. As this survey data shows, the market clearly views as-a-Service as the future but are looking for a new and better approach to realize a consistent cloud experience, across public, private and the edge.”

Executives recognize the critical need to modernize IT to support future business growth and competitive advantage. aaS solutions will be very important for their company’s future (58 percent), competitiveness (55 percent) and growth (53 percent).

Three quarters of ITDMs agree that at their organization, data is siloed between public and private clouds (77 percent) and admit that data silos are a key challenge (75 percent) for their businesses. About two-thirds (66 percent) state they agree that data migration to the public cloud is currently stalled at their organization.

Younger ITDMs are more fearful that their jobs will become obsolete due to aaS. The survey findings show only about a quarter of ITDMs 55 and older (23 percent) are concerned that aaS adoption is making their job obsolete, compared to almost two-thirds (60 percent) of 22-34-year-olds. For both age groups, many (67 percent) ITDMs are concerned about new generations of digital natives having an advantage over their experience as it relates to aaS adoption.

Despite the changes ahead and apprehension from younger ITDMs, about nine-in-ten (87 percent) of all respondents agree that aaS adoption will advance their career and envision a shift in their roles from day-to-day IT support toward more of a business strategist role. Globally, seven-in-ten ITDMs say aaS adoption will make their role within their organization more important (72 percent) and give them more control over data (70 percent) and budget (71 percent).

YJFX chooses Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out customer service infrastructure

Red Hat announced that YJFX Inc., a financial subsidiary of Yahoo Group focused on foreign exchange services, has adopted Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out the company’s private cloud infrastructure. 

Red Hat’s massively scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers YJFX extensive scalability, helping it deliver new infrastructure more quickly as it seeks to bring differentiating applications and services to end users.

YJFX provides online foreign exchange (forex) trading services in 22 currencies as well as investment trust services. As a leading service provider in the forex industry, YJFX constantly seeks new ways to improve customer satisfaction along with the reliability and quality of its offered services, both current and new. To continue enhancing the customer experience, YJFX wanted to drive innovation at all levels of the company’s IT stack, starting with the infrastructure layer.

The company’s existing IT environment for building new services used proprietary virtualization technologies running on public cloud infrastructure. While workable, this strategy made delivering new infrastructure environments in a timely manner difficult. 

The IT teams in charge of the infrastructure had to manually make adjustments to deliver individual environments and servers, increasing time to market of new services while increasing procurement costs. From a cost and time perspective, these challenges limited YJFX’s ability to drive innovation more quickly.

In order to drive down the costs and time associated with delivering new services, YJFX wanted to empower its developers to self-provision their environments more quickly without having to rely on IT operations teams. To do this, the company began exploring options beyond the public cloud in 2018, electing to migrate to a scalable, private cloud built on Red Hat OpenStack.

Built on the open industry standards of the OpenStack project, Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers the innovation of the OpenStack community to YJFX paired with hardened codes, enterprise security updates and the expertise and support of Red Hat. 

YJFX also participated in a discovery session of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution, provided by Red Hat. With the support of Red Hat Consulting, YJFX was able to better visualize the issues and effects of the migration project as well as conceptualize an image of the ideal private cloud development environment. 

To deploy the new Red Hat-based private cloud, YJFX enlisted DTS CORPORATION, a systems integrator, to handle the migration work and build out the new infrastructure. After comparing the costs of maintaining and operating its existing infrastructure to the new private cloud platform, YJFX expects to see the associated expenses lowered by 30-40 percent over the next five years. 

The time needed to prepare development environments, which previously could take as long as one month, has now been reduced to a few hours thanks to developers being able to self-provision resources. This has also led to a reduction in workload for IT operations staff while providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure layer that can help drive new application delivery and improve customer service.

The initial migration for the dealing room was completed at the end of April this year.

SiriusIQ joins with Automation Anywhere to improve migration of critical application workloads to Microsoft Azure

SiriusIQ announced a strategic collaboration with Automation Anywhere to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of automated solutions for migration of enterprise systems such as SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

The capabilities of the SiriusIQ's Microsoft Azure-based platform shine for migration use cases because they allow immediate, parallelized, non-linear, movement and transformation of data to Microsoft Azure cloud through an iterative, agile approach that captures and digitizes human knowledge. 

As the platform 'learns', speed and capability increase continuously, and the operational patterns are captured in the platform's graph models.

Unlike the classic one-time-event approach to migration, SiriusIQ has created a unified blueprint that uses migration as the pathway to digital transformation, augmenting and learning from human workers by leveraging digital labor based on operational patterns captured during the migration process.

"The combination of the SiriusIQ graph models with Automation Anywhere's web-based RPA platform, Enterprise A2019 represents true intelligent automation for scenarios, such as test and validation, process refactoring, digital workflows and others," said Glenn Field, founder and CEO of SiriusIQ. "We are excited to collaborate with Automation Anywhere to be at the forefront of the digital labor revolution." 

"Organizations today are looking to accelerate the migration of modern applications as they digitally transform, but at the same time, they want to reduce risks and costs," said Peter Meechan, chief corporate development officer at Automation Anywhere. "Our RPA platform combined with SiriusIQ's API and tools helps enterprises speed up the migrations of key applications and processes to improve productivity and lower operating costs."

Snowflake partners with Next Pathway to automate migrations from legacy data warehouses to Snowflake

Snowflake and Next Pathway announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the migration from legacy data warehouses to Snowflake. This move has led Snowflake to incorporate SHIFT into their technology offerings under the banner, ‘SnowPATH Powered by Next Pathway’, effective immediately.

Snowflake will license Next Pathway’s proprietary code translation technology, SHIFTTM, to provide Snowflake customers the ability to automate what is typically the most time-consuming, manual and costly task in a cloud migration effort – legacy code conversion. 

This includes the automatic conversion of database objects such as SQL, Stored Procedures, workflow and orchestration logic (ETL), DDL, and other code types, from technologies such as Teradata and Netezza.

Traditionally, the path to decommission legacy data warehouses involved lengthy manual development and testing efforts to rewrite and refactor code that has been built over decades – a process that takes months or years to complete. 

Through the use of SHIFTTM, customers can automatically convert the most important (or the most complicated) workloads in hours, reducing migration costs.

Flexential becomes first data center to host ONTAP AI test drive platform

Flexential has announced that it is the first data center globally to host ONTAP AI Test Drive, a fully optimized and tested infrastructure solution for AI workloads. 

The platform, currently available in one of Flexential's Portland, Oregon, (Hillsboro) data centers, will be offered in more of the 21 markets served by Flexential in the future. For a limited time, providers are offering a test drive to allow select customers to try ONTAP AI before making an investment.

ONTAP AI testing using ImageNet data with a NetApp AFF A800 system and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers in a 1:4 storage-to- compute configuration achieved training throughput of 23,000 training images per second (TIPS) and inference throughput of 60,000 TIPS. With this configuration, clients can expect to get over 2GBps of sustained throughput (5GBps peak) with well under 1ms of latency while the GPUs operate at over 95 percent utilization.

A single AFF A800 system supports throughput of 25GBps for sequential reads and 1 million IOPS for small random reads at under 500-microsecond latencies for NAS workloads. These results demonstrate available performance headroom that can support many more DGX-1 servers as requirements increase.

ONTAP AI allows users to start small and grow as needed, and subsequently adding compute, storage, and networking to clustered con gurations without disrupting ongoing operations. Start with a 1:1 storage-to-compute configuration and scale out as your data grows to a 1:5 configuration and beyond. 

NetApp’s rack-scale architecture allows organizations to start with an AFF A220 and grow as needed to scale from hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes with all-flash. With NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup, up to 20 petabytes of single namespace can handle more than 400 billion les.

ONTAP AI leverages NetApp Data Fabric to unify data management across the pipeline with a single platform. Use the same tools to securely control and protect data in flight, in use, or at rest and meet compliance requirements with confidence. If an issue arises in the deep learning environment, users can rely on their single point of contact and support model to help troubleshoot and provide guidance.

"Artificial intelligence and machine learning will soon be used in almost every industry, meaning that now is the time for businesses to plan how they will manage, support and optimize the technology to run these mission-critical applications," said Jason Carolan, chief innovation officer, Flexential. "Our data centers are ready to provide the power, cooling, resiliency, security, and connectivity to support these high-density AI workloads. Plus, through our professional services practice, we are able to help customers seamlessly migrate data, integrate to hyper-scale or private cloud, and provide services to secure their platforms." 

In January, Flexential first announced its collaboration with NVIDIA to bring DGX-Ready data center colocation services to customers. This capability ensures Flexential data centers can support the high-density power and cooling necessary for advanced AI workloads. ONTAP AI, available in the Flexential Portland data center, allows select customers to pilot their AI workloads.