Migrating Your Data and Analytics to Azure? Address These Challenges Up Front

Data Warehouses Are Different – and Challenging to Migrate.

In this blog I talk about the challenges in migrating analytical data stores and data warehouses to Azure and how to address those challenges to ensure a cost-efficient and successful cloud data warehouse. Unlike OLTP applications, data warehouses are complex. They have many different kinds users accessing large and varied data sets with a wide range of business intelligence and analytical applications launching unpredictable queries. Analytics can range from simple dashboards and reports to complex, resource-intensive queries and machine learning programs. Because of these complex and varied workloads, data warehouses are more challenging to understand and migrate than OLTP applications.

I also describe how to address these issues right up front, before you migrate. Teleran’s automated Azure Data Warehouse Assessment solution quickly analyzes your on-premise data warehouse usage and recommends the optimal Azure services for your specific workload. It identifies and remediates issues that impede efficient and effective data warehouse migrations and prevents wasteful usage in Azure, saving companies in some cases $20,000-$30,000 per month in Azure consumption costs.

Matching the Right Azure Services for Customers’ Data and Analytics

Azure offers a variety of powerful choices for data warehousing. Should you move your data warehouse to a SQL Server Managed Instance, an Azure VM, Azure SQL DB, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake or Azure Databricks? It depends on many factors. How big is your data warehouse, what kinds of data are accessed, how varied are the workloads, do users run complex queries or a high volume of small read/write queries? Do you have 1000s of concurrent users? Are there rapidly changing data schemas, or a multi-tenant data warehouse?

These are just some of the factors that determine where a you should migrate your data warehouse to, where the risks are, and how best to provision and configure the data warehouse in Azure to minimize costs while optimizing performance and value to the business.  Some workloads with complex queries may require a high-performance option like Azure Synapse, higher concurrency workloads may work best on Azure SQL DB, while infrequently used data may best reside in a lower cost data lake.

Minimizing and Managing Your Azure Data Warehouse Costs 

Legacy data warehouses often contain inefficient processes, applications and querying habits that, while tolerated on amply resourced on-premise servers, drive up costs unnecessarily and significantly in Azure. To control your Azure costs, it is critical to identify and address wasteful usage practices and querying prior to migrating to the cloud. Because data warehouse workloads are dynamic, unpredictable and resource intensive, It’s hard to project and manage consumption costs in Azure. The larger and more varied the workload, the harder it is to project and manage these costs.

Addressing Data Warehouse Migration Challenges

Teleran offers an automated Azure Data Warehouse Assessment solution for Oracle, SQL Server and other on-premise data warehouses. Teleran’s assessment solution uses a small footprint network agent on premise to unobtrusively capture a continuous view of all your varied data warehouse and analytical activity. The agent periodically sends usage metadata to Teleran’s repository where your data warehouse usage is analyzed. It recommends the optimal Azure services for your specific workloads. It also identifies and guides remediation of issues that impede efficient and effective data warehouse migrations. And, importantly, it ensures Azure cost-efficiency, in some cases saving companies $20,000-$30,000 per month in cloud consumption costs.

Teleran’s Automated Azure Migration Assessment addresses data warehouse migration challenges with these capabilities:

  • Captures all relevant characteristics of production data warehouse usage patterns without disruption or overhead
  • Automatically analyzes SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata or DB2 data warehouse workloads and recommends the best set of Azure services, resources and capacity to perform to your service levels
  • Identifies usage and application issues to reduce the risks, costs and time to migrate
  • Identifies and guides remediation of wasteful user and application behaviors to ensure your data warehouse meets business needs while minimizing ongoing Azure costs
  • Highlights opportunities to improve and modernize analytical applications to optimize the business value and ROI from your Azure investment
  • Replaces time-consuming manual assessments, bringing scalability, transparency, speed, and accuracy to planning and executing the optimal data warehouse and analytics migration.

Customer Benefits

  • Minimizes migration risks, costs and effort
  • Delivers most cost-efficient Azure environment
  • Builds optimal Azure Migration roadmap based on customer’s unique data sets, business needs, users, analytical applications and data warehouse usage
  • Ensures business objectives and performance requirements are met
  • Identifies opportunities to improve and modernize your data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics

Complements and Extends Microsoft Migration Tools 

Microsoft offers several excellent tools for migration. Teleran’s migration assessment solution complements and extends these tools. Microsoft’s Data Migration Assistant (DMA), for example, identifies incompatibilities that can impact database functionality in Azure and recommends performance and reliability features that can be used in Azure. It does not provide in-depth analysis of data warehouse and analytical usage over time that enables accurate Azure provisioning and cost projections. It also does not identify and remediate many of the cost wasting behaviors that occur in legacy data warehouses. Teleran’s Assessment solution is designed to address the unique challenges of understanding and migrating data warehousing and analytics workloads to reduce migration time, cost and risk, while optimizing business value.

Getting It Right

Data Warehouses are complex and dynamic. Before you migrate to Azure, you need to understand how your data warehouse is used to identify the best Azure data warehouse services, whether it is Azure SQL, Synapse, Data Lake or a combination of services. It’s also critical to understand legacy operational, query and user issues in your data warehouse that will drive up migration risks, costs and time, and consumption costs once in Azure.

Teleran’s automated Azure Data Warehouse Assessment solution quickly analyzes your on-premise data warehouse and recommends the optimal Azure services for your specific workload. It identifies and remediates issues that impede efficient and effective data warehouse migrations and prevents wasteful usage in Azure that can help you save tens of thousands of dollars per month in Azure consumption costs. Teleran’s Azure migration solution brings scalability, transparency and speed to ensure a successful migration to Azure.

More information on Teleran’s Migration Solutions for Azure Data Warehousing

More on Teleran’s Solutions for Azure

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