A global leading hospitality and entertainment company, with 65,000 employees and $5B in annual revenue, pursued a dedicated connectivity solution to undertake a fast and flexible digital transformation process. With a strong focus on customer loyalty and operational efficiencies, through digital transformation, the Company aimed to streamline their marketing processes, in order to increase their agility and speed to market, to create curated online experiences based on their customers’ hospitality and entertainment preferences. In order to accomplish this, the company opted to migrate its existing two-petabyte (PB) on-premises Apache Hadoop platform to the cloud. The Company undertook their customer-focused digital transformation project in two phases. Each phase had its own set of challenges – and solutions incorporating Megaport connectivity.
The Company leveraged Megaport’s high-performance Software Defined Network (SDN) to complete their Apache Hadoop migration to Azure. Establishing two 10Gb Ports with Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) to Azure, they were able to provision fast, flexible, and direct access to the cloud and transfer the entire 2PB of data to Azure within 26 days. They benefited from a 93% decrease in the time frame considering how long it would typically take to migrate the data over VPN. This allowed the company to decommission the 14 racks of equipment as originally planned and begin to build new features for their data analytics platform in Azure.
Egress Costs for Incremental Data Transfer: During the Company’s migration process from their onpremises Apache Hadoop platform, their project team discovered a separate entity within the organisation leveraging Google Cloud Platform to conduct marketing analytics. Incremental transfers of data were being copied from Apache Hadoop to Google Cloud as part of standard operations. As the Company’s on-premises Apache Hadoop platform was now decommissioned, and was in Azure, the egress costs from data leaving Azure destined to Google Cloud Platform, over the Internet, exceeded the department’s budget.
Provisioning two additional 10Gb Ports through their self-serve Megaport account, the Company’s networking team established private, high-speed, and dedicated connectivity to Google Cloud Platform. Their new VXC provided multicloud connectivity between Azure and Google, reducing costs and increasing efficiencies as data traversed cloud environments.
The Company’s next phase of operations will include migrating their 1.4PB enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from their on-premises data centre into an Azure environment. This will allow for a more elastic expansion of EDW services without the need to invest in additional infrastructure, providing increased agility and reduced time-to-market. The Company plans to leverage Megaport-enabled cloud connectivity to migrate this data without impacting existing operations.
Cloud services, cloud connectivity, network, digital work, oncloud
