Big Data Use Case – What Ticketmaster Learned

The insideBIGDATA technology use case guide – Ticketmaster: Using the Cloud Capitalizing on Performance, Analytics, and Data to Deliver Insights provides an in-depth look at a high-profile cloud migration use case. One of the most widely discussed topics in IT today is moving workloads to cloud. The process of deciding whether or when to migrate to the cloud can be daunting. Further, finding the right technology fit for your enterprise  objectives can be challenging with a cloud solution ecosystem filled with alternatives. To make the cloud adoption process more straightforward, this  white paper provided a number of areas for consideration when evaluating a cloud platform. We also focused on the experiences of a high-profile enterprise—Ticketmaster—during the company’s migration to the cloud. Finally, we offered a top-tier cloud solution—Teradata IntelliCloud—as an  excellent choice for transitioning from an on-premises system to one in the cloud.

What Ticketmaster Learned

During the cloud migration process, the Ticketmaster staff learned several important lessons from which other organizations can benefit:

• Networking – Don’t minimize the amount of effort required to deal with networking considerations with a cloud system, including VPN  connections.
• Project Management – There was a real need to coordinate a fair number of disparate teams within Teradata and Ticketmaster—and the  Teradata Project Management (TDPM) team addressed this requirement. It’s important to have a close working relationship between the  company project manager and Teradata project manager. There is a lot of coordination on the Teradata side that is difficult to achieve without  engaging Teradata project management resources.
• Data Movement – The company needed to consider how best to move 35TB of data thousands of miles across the country with minimal  downtime. There were a few things that Ticketmaster did to ensure successful data movement: (i) Do some housecleaning and identify critical data and make it as small as possible; old dev copies must go!; (ii) You don’t have to ship the whole database at once. Identify what can go early or late. For example, early on you can transfer any large insert-only tables containing historical data; (iii) Utilize all the tools at your disposal,  e.g., Teradata Data Mover, BAR, ETL processes (such as Informatica and Talend), shipped drives, etc.
• NPARC –  This is a streaming backup and recovery solution which is traditionally done by plugging in cables between cabinets in same data  center. As such, it’s easy to take a multi-terabyte or even petabyte system and blast it over to the new platform—but moving data to the cloud is  different and takes longer.
• Access to the Instance – Once you’re running in the cloud, you’ll need to adjust the way you do things compared to what you’ve always done. For  example, there’s no access to the operating system of the Teradata cloud instance, so OS activities must be performed by the Teradata Cloud Operations Team.
• Backups –  One of the benefits of IntelliCloud is that Teradata takes care of backups. You need to be aware that a managed service for backup may be somewhat different than what you’re accustomed to, e.g., no incremental backups.

If you prefer, the complete insideBIGDATA technology use case guide – Ticketmaster: Using the Cloud Capitalizing on Performance, Analytics, and Data to Deliver Insights is available for download in PDF from the insideBIGDATA White Paper Library, courtesy of Teradata.