IQ Solutions

Celona Technologies are rapidly affirming their place as the innovation leaders in next generation data migration technology.

They recently asked us to collaborate on an innovative new approach to migration reporting which enables the business to visualise a range of mission-critical metrics, in real-time, with exhaustive tracking of individual migration objects throughout the life history of the migration.

Here is what a long day, plenty of coffee and some next generation architecture can deliver.

The Data Migration challenge - traditional approaches are failing large or complex migrations

Large scale data migrations are traditionally risky affairs with high-profile failures frequently making the headlines.

The most common approach to data migrations is via ETL (Extract Transform Load) style technology and this is where Celona fundamentally differs.

Celona have developed a far more agile solution that reduces the impact to the business by enabling iterative migrations that rapidly migrate critical data without any impact to the business, even during working hours.

Their ‘lights-on’ solution has attracted considerable interest, particularly with a number of tier-1 telcos so Celona invited the IQ team to workshop their intelligent reporting capabilities to see how 3rd generation migration technology could integrate with 3rd generation business intelligence reporting.

Next generation architecture

The design of Celona is stunning and truly evolutionary.

Having worked with ETL technology and helped deliver migration initiatives for nearly 15 years I can guarantee that the approach by Celona will transform the way complex migrations are enabled from this point on.

One of they key differences is in the way Celona models the real world and this transforms the way migrations are developed and deployed.

Gone are the ’spaghetti-like’ ETL models that can be incredibly difficult to manage and maintain in large projects.

Instead they build models of real-life objects like equipment, customers, locations that all exist in a particular state and are related to each other.

Major changes to the underlying models can be made with great ease, even during run-time so the migration manager has ultimate flexibility. The ability to change transformation mappings and logic mid-project has always been an area that traditional ETL has failed to manage effectively.

The state management of Celona is incredibly powerful and I believe is unique in the migration arena. As a result the customer always has 360 degree visibility of their business so they can instantly see which objects have been migrated, are pending, have been rejected and are live for business use. Gone are the endless log files and frantic searches for migration errors, in Celona every object is fully managed.

This ability to have control over real business objects down to such an atomic level is a turning-point in migration design as the batch oriented approach to traditional ETL has been in need of an overhaul for some considerable time.

So, how does Celona perform with business reporting?

Exceptional.

In less than a day we delivered a stunning new dashboard reporting platform that provides huge benefits to technicians and management alike.

This was no prototype. Together we delivered a fully functional platform that was up and running and by the end of the day we were actually monitoring the migration of real client data.

The Celona architecture is essentially an open API that provides rapid integration with external products and this makes it incredibly flexible and future-proof, both for large-scale, complex migrations and for business reporting.

In an incredibly short time we had created dashboards and reporting capabilities that are critically lacking in other migration suites.

An example of one dashboard we created is provided at the link below. In the simulated demo we show how a migration operator can identify the status and location of all migration objects in seconds. This is critical when managing large-scale migrations where many thousands of objects are migrated every hour and any failures for example need to be identified and resolved quickly.

Click to watch the celona demo video.

With many of the other migration toolsets it is essentially a task of having to develop a solution from scratch and this requires major effort. (If you have ever worked with the usual ETL suspects you will know exactly what I mean, this can be a major drain on budget and critical resources).

Chris Harrison, Celona account director commented:

“The effectiveness of the operational dashboard is extremely important to our customers. We needed a bespoke dashboard for a complex customer requirement which would have taken several weeks for us to construct. The IQ team developed a working model within a day which is a testament both to their agility and productivity. The IQ-developed dashboard powerfully demonstrated the capability of the advanced Celona data migration capability giving us a clear competitive advantage. The customer was very impressed both with Celona and with the speed and flexibility with which the IQ team could deliver a compelling solution to their problem.”

For more details about Celona and their next generation migration technology go to www.celona.com.

If you would like to explore the benefits of intelligent reporting contact us directly via the contact page.