Webinar – Move To The Cloud

Posted on by Matt Griffith

I’ll be running a live webinar on the 16th September 2020 in conjunction with Mark McGill from Delphix, where we will do a live demo of some really cool stuff with data virtualisation in the cloud.

Using Delphix with the public cloud (AWS in this case) we will demo how super easy it is to spin up secure dev/test/analytics environments of any size on demand.

I’ve been working on this as a solution for a customer over the last few months and the possibilities it opens up are numerous.  Gone are the days of the lengthy procurement process to get some tin in the data centre, or the request process to have VMs spun up, or the capacity planning headaches, or the on going costs even when you’re not using your infrastructure.

The public cloud solves all that but you mix it with Delphix and you also solve the problems of moving data around environments.  It literally takes minutes to spin up 1, 10, 100 new copies of a masked production database on server resources of your choice to meet your requirements right now.

I’m pretty excited about this so come have a look at the demo and see what you think.

Here’s the registration page.  If you can’t make it register anyway and you’ll be sent a recording to view at your leisure.

See you there.

 

Virtualise Your Application Alongside Your Data

Posted on by Matt Griffith

Delphix Data Pod

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of what we see and read about the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform talks about how we can move data around the enterprise and cloud rapidly and securely.  A key value driver of the product is the test data management (TDM) capabilities unsurpassed by anything else in the market right now – the ability to provide data fast, secure and everywhere.  And a key component that always impresses the students I teach on my Delphix training courses is the self-service features.  Handing off control of data to the consumer (the developer, tester, qa’er, data analyst) is a huge paradigm shift from what we’ve been laboriously doing for decades.

It’s not until you drill down further into the features that you begin to realise the many use cases the Dynamic Data Platform can address and often these are what I class as added benefits in addition to the key marketed features.  What I mean by that is you may not implement the product based purely on that use case but now you have it you may as well take full advantage of it.  The return on investment grows far greater than originally forecast (and the ROI on Delphix is pretty impressive anyway).

As I said, we talk mainly about data but what about the application itself?  Development and testing, especially in todays devops world is fast paced and access to up-to-date and relevant data is key.  But obviously we also need to work with the application code and often, backwards and forwards on many iterations of the application depending on priorities, resource availability, schedules as so on.

Delphix has a concept of the data pod.  What is a data pod?

A data pod is a set of virtual data environments and controls built by the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform and delivered to users for self-service data consumption

Again, it all points towards data but in actual fact a data pod can contain the application too.  So we can have all the TDM capability goodness with our application code as well as data.  Rapid lightweight provisioning, bookmarking, branching, rewinding, sharing to name a few.

Lets dig in to this and see how it fits together and look at some of the main benefits.

Continue reading “Virtualise Your Application Alongside Your Data” →

Recovery From Logical Data Corruption Using Delphix

Posted on by Matt Griffith

Logical Corruption

 

 

 

 

Delphix data virtualization can provide the solution to numerous use cases for the provision and consumption of data and when you begin to work with the product you can find yourself coming up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ways to utilize its functionality often replacing existing costly solutions and doing so quickly.

Here’s a use case you may not have thought of, or at least you didn’t when you virtualized and provisioned your first VDB or vFile.

Warning: this post is a little more wordy than usual!

Continue reading “Recovery From Logical Data Corruption Using Delphix” →

GDPR For Non-production Environments

Posted on by Matt Griffith

GDPR

 

 

 

 

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May of 2018 and businesses who collect, use, and share data from European citizens – whether based in the EU or not – will have to comply or risk some pretty heavy punishment (up to EUR20m or 4% of annual worldwide turnover!).  So how can the GDPR affect companies current processes when copying and moving data into non-production environments?

For every production system there can be tens of non-production database copies used to support the ongoing development and testing of that production system.  In my 15+ years of working with databases in various industries I have rarely seen effective and secure processes to desensitize data when copying the production source to these supporting environments.  To be fair, recent years have shown an improvement here but seldom enough and often the process is more of a token gesture to put a tick in a box, rather than a clear concerted effort to ensure the data is completely desensitized and importantly, certified to be so.  That can’t be the case anymore.

Lets take a look at what impact GDPR has on this process and how the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform is a good example of a tool businesses can use to achieve compliance.

Continue reading “GDPR For Non-production Environments” →