Why You Should Consider Migrating from Netezza to Snowflake
With Netezza, IBM was one of the first companies to provide a data warehousing solution to allow organizations to analyze and manage large amounts of data. However, as technology has evolved, the need for more advanced, agile data warehousing solutions has become apparent.Â
The Snowflake Data Cloud is a modern data warehouse that allows companies to take advantage of its cloud-based architecture to improve efficiencies while at the same time reducing costs.Â
In this blog post, we will explore the reasons why many organizations are choosing to migrate from Netezza to Snowflake.Â
As Netezza creeps closer to its end-of-life date in early 2023, you may be looking for options to migrate to, this post will provide valuable insights into why Snowflake may be the best choice.
What Are the Benefits of Migrating to Snowflake
Almost No Maintenance
With Snowflake’s built-in performance, complexity is reduced since there’s no infrastructure to maintain and no tuning required. With less complexity, fewer engineers are needed, leading also to lower costs for the business.
Faster Analyst Access to Data
Quicker, more accurate business decisions can be made when analysts have fast access to all current and historical data at any time with Snowflake’s elastic, near-unlimited scale and speed.Â
All of Your Data in One Location
Easily store, integrate, and extract critical insights from petabytes of structured or semi-structured data by creating a single source of truth in Snowflake. Data integrated with Snowflake can be in a variety of formats including JSON, XML, AVRO, ORC, or Parquet.Â
Access for All of Your Users
With the ability to scale up and out, Snowflake allows a virtually unlimited number of concurrent users and applications without performance degradation. With Snowflake, workloads won’t have to compete with each other to use the same resources.Â
Data Sharing
Enterprises can easily create data sharing relationships with direct, governed, and secure sharing in near-real time. With Snowflake, organizations can be data consumers, data providers, or both.
Complete SQL Database
No need to learn new tools as Snowflake supports the tools millions of business users already know how to use today. Snowflake works with an entire ecosystem of tools including Extract Transform and Load (ETL), data integration, and analysis tools.Â
Disaster Recovery
Snowflake allows for an easy and automatic backup of data and enables faster disaster recovery of critical IT systems. Businesses never have to worry over downtime for their critical systems with Snowflake.Â
Who Would Benefit the Most from Moving from Netezza to Snowflake?
The following are some of the key scenarios in which customers migrate to Snowflake. If your business fits any of these, you stand to benefit immensely by moving to Snowflake:
Legacy Platform is Inadequate
If your business currently has a legacy, on-premises platform, you may not be set up to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s business users due to concurrency and performance issues. Legacy platforms are slow to adapt to changes in business use cases, which can lead to loss of opportunities due to critical data analysis not being able to be done in a timely manner.
Legacy Platform Cost is Unaffordable and Unpredictable
As your data and workload grow, the cost too can grow exponentially with the need for complex reconfigurations within legacy platforms. The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform allows true pay-as-you-go cloud storage and computing—all without the need for complex reconfigurations.
Capturing New Data Sources is Difficult
Oftentimes infrastructure changes or new tools are required to capture new data sources in a legacy system. This makes the task exceedingly difficult. Being based in the cloud allows for new types of analytics to be accessed and refined without the need for infrastructure or tooling changes.
Managing Legacy Platform is Too Complex
Legacy platform management requires traditional IT delivery models with extensive management intervention. This creates a complex environment where that becomes unwieldy. Moving to the cloud enables enterprises to move to a more agile, on-demand, as-a-service model that minimizes the need for management intervention.
How Long Does It Take to Migrate From Netezza to Snowflake?
Typical migrations from Netezza to Snowflake can take anywhere from 12 weeks to over a year depending on several factors. The amount of data and number of tables needed to migrate are major considerations of course, but so are the tools to be used to perform the recreation of tables and data movement. Using a tool specifically designed for the migration of databases will significantly lower the time required, but will also increase the cost.
The biggest factor in how long it will take, however, is whether you perform the migration yourself or work with a consultant business like phData. Without the expertise and the automation tools of a consultancy on your side, the do-it-yourself approach will certainly take much longer,Â
How Much Will a Migration from Netezza to Snowflake Cost?
The cost of migration from Netezza to Snowflake varies wildly between a do-it-yourself approach and working with a consultant like phData. phData uses automated processes for what would otherwise be highly manual, such as the translation of SQL statements and the creation of role-based access control in Snowflake.Â
Without these automation tools, an enterprise would have to hire dozens of data engineers, driving the average cost to more than double what a consultancy agency would charge.Â
Ready to Get Started in the Migration to Snowflake?
Migrating from Netezza to Snowflake is an easy decision for any business looking for reliable, quick access to their data in a modern scalable data warehouse. With the ability to automatically and instantly scale storage and compute separately, Snowflake’s performance and reliability are unmatched.Â
When you’re ready to make the change, be sure to read the next blog in this series: How to Migrate from Netezza to Snowflake to help you along the way.
Want some help with migrating from Netezza to Snowflake?
