The Challenge

A prominent west coast online gaming company was outgrowing their aging brick-and-mortar data center and data warehouse. As is so often the case with enterprise implementations, the need to manage upgrades, add computing resources, and ensure uptime were outside the client’s core competency. Further, the data warehouse quickly outgrew budget constraints.

The client started by working with the enterprise teams at AWS to migrate their more-than-100-node Vertica cluster to the cloud. Other firms had told them it simply couldn’t be done—no cluster that large had ever been built in the cloud. Confronted with this challenge, AWS and the client approached Full 360 for our expertise in determining whether the warehouse could be moved.

“That columnar data store was the largest on the planet.”

“They just made our life easier. It was never easy, but it actually worked and it's working now.”

The Result

Full 360 proved it could be done. We built a complete replica of the client’s data cluster in AWS—migrating nearly a petabyte of data in the process.

However, it wasn’t merely a proof of concept; we demonstrated that such a cluster was reliable in production and that it would meet or exceed strict performance standards.

We built this massive Vertica cluster using our proprietary knowledge including innovative imaging, devops, and service discovery techniques. We demonstrated how to tear down and rebuild the entire infrastructure in an automated, predictable, and repeatable way.

Building the entire 100+ node cluster took only 48 hours, once the data warehouse backup become available in S3. This is incredibly fast for such a massive dataset, and clearly demonstrates the power of running a data warehouse in the cloud. Migrating a data warehouse to the cloud offers incredible flexibility: it can be moved geographically, destroyed and rebuilt, replicated, and upgraded. The cloud also removes the need for costly and time-intensive hardware maintenance.