Moving to Cloud Services Hampered by Speed Bottleneck:
A global pandemic rapidly accelerated demand for online retail. This meant that systems designed for years of gradual future growth were suddenly at capacity. A hybrid cloud solution could help alleviate the capacity peaks by providing on demand processing, however it required fast data transfers that would not tax the already peaked CPUs. A typical TCP/IP based transfer would take too long and would require too many CPU cycles. The customer needed a different approach to feeding data to their hybrid cloud environment, otherwise they would be left with a hefty infrastructure upgrade cost.
Challenges
Rapidly growing demand led to existing infrastructure being maxed out. The customer required the flexibility of a cloud solution to perform their data warehousing but also needed to be able to meet the tight SLAs based on an on-premise solution. Moving the data via SFTP was too slow and used up precious CPU cycles during peak times.
Solution
Luminex’s MDI Cloud Data Sharing for their SFTP transfers to the cloud.
Benefits
- 68% reduction in elapsed time for file transfers
- 96% reduction in Mainframe MIPS use
- Successful hybrid cloud implementation
Blistering Speeds with MDI Cloud Data Sharing:
In the early stages of their shift to cloud, the customer recognized that TCP/IP transfers were using large amounts of CPU and not getting the data to the cloud fast enough to meet their SLAs. A major upgrade was urgently needed. Fortunately, Luminex stepped up to help. A customized solution was designed using Luminex’s MDI Cloud Data Sharing platform. It enabled the client to transfer data to multiple cloud providers within their SLAs all while using extremely minimal CPU cycles on the mainframe. Multiple business groups ended up using the Luminex MDI platform to successfully implement their hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
Results and Benefits:
The MDI SecureTransfer and Azure Data Lake solution provided the opportunity for joint data analytics that was, until then, functionally unavailable to the company due to security, speed, and implementation issues. SecureTransfer provided a solution that met recently mandated security protocols by using native FICON channels and off-hosted SFTP. In addition, they found the solution to be faster than their previous FTP approach, even with the addition of end-to-end encryption.
With a shrinking mainframe IT team, ease of implementation was also a growing priority. The client found the Luminex solution extremely easy to use and only took about an hour for JCL set up and output reporting. Most importantly, SecureTransfer enabled access to critical mainframe data that had previously been limited to only a few mainframe reporting tools. With all of their information in one place, the company could now enhance and automate data analytics, resulting in a better claims experience, improving business operations and giving them a competitive edge to ensure future success.
