Review: Attunity Cloudbeam Simplifies Moving Big Data to Cloud
As companies migrate more data from on-premises data centers to the cloud, they are looking for easy and inexpensive ways to do so. Attunity Cloudbeam is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is designed to remove the bottleneck of low bandwidth connections to the cloud by leveraging high performance file transfer and data acceleration features. It is especially well suited to large data sets.
The solution offers an easy-to-use and inexpensive way to move, back up and/or synchronize any amount of data on a pay-per-use and subscription basis. Cloudbeam is also an easy way to build a disaster recovery solution for corporate data.
Many customers use it to provide accelerated data loading into Amazon’s Redshift database as a service (DBaaS) platform. Amazon S3 administrators can use the service for disaster recovery and maintaining high availability of public and corporate data and content. Cloudbeam can be used to import data into Hadoop on Amazon EC2.
Another popular use case is to make data more geographically available via Amazon Region-to-Region replication.
Database administrators can subscribe to Attunity Cloudbeam via the company website, install Attunity Repliweb, and get started shuffling large amounts of data around. Then, using a browser based interface, they can define the source and destination and click to start the transfer. Console or Web-based monitoring and email alerts make sure that you know what’s going on with your data at every step of the process.
Cloudbeam can be used for full uploads or for continuous syncing. Many customers perform an initial upload of an entire dataset and then perform periodic loads which only copies changed data.
Attunity TurboStream CDC is a proprietary technology that stages source data, consolidates changes and delivers data in parallel to the target optimizing change data capture (CDC) for high-volume and low-bandwidth scenarios. This works well for Big Data analytics where live data is stored in a data warehouse and cloud environments are used for analysis.
Cloudbeam turns an arduous journey into a simple and straightforward one. Previously, moving on-premises data into the cloud would require many hours of development time on the part of a DBA in a combination of scripting and manual effort. Old data structures would have to be analyzed so that new data structures could be created in the cloud. The data itself would have to be inspected, exported, normalized, validated and imported.
Cloudbeam automates this entire process, reducing development time from weeks or months to hours. Attunity provides several case studies that illustrate the ROI provided from cost savings, primarily related to labor.
Current Attunity customers include about half of the Fortune 100, particularly in the finance, technology, healthcare, government and manufacturing/industrial verticals.
Cloudbeam is available from the Attunity website and from the AWS Marketplace. Cloudbeam support is available for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 LUW, DB2 for iSeries, DB2 for z/OS, Sybase, MySQL, Salesforce and any other ODBC source.
Matthew David Sarrel is executive director of Sarrel Group, an editorial services, product test lab and information technology consulting company. He is a contributing editor for PC Magazine, a contributing analyst for GigaOM and a frequent contributor to the Internet.com family of sites. Previously, Mr. Sarrel was a technical director for PC Magazine Labs, where he led all testing conducted by the Applications, Enterprise and Development Software, OS and Utilities, Network Infrastructure and Wireless LAN teams. His career also includes stints as an executive at two Internet startups and as director of IT for the New Jersey Medical School National Tuberculosis Center.
