How BigQuery Enables Limitless Scale for ADARA

Business Situation

ADARA’s data co-op historically relied upon a legacy IBM Netezza platform for all data asset storage, processing, and analytics. As brand adoption and data channels increased, ADARA required a platform that could easily scale to keep pace with rapidly expanding data volumes and processing requirements.

ADARA’s on-premise data-warehousing systems were not only difficult to scale, but also reaching their end-of-life as a product line. In addition, ADARA’s hybrid on-premise hosting provider was diminishing in price-efficiency and limiting in both capacity and capability. The company needed a platform that could scale up with rapid growth and would meet GDPR requirements.

Solution

To address these challenges, ADARA partnered with Maven Wave to pursue a multi-phased initiative to migrate its existing data centers to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Maven Wave worked on an initial phase to prove that BigQuery would be able to handle the workload that was previously on Netezza, which included multiple performance and concurrency tests.    

Maven Wave then helped ADARA plan and manage the migration of three data centers and over 100 terabytes of historical travel data to the GCP platform. The entire architecture included over 850 servers and 3500 CPU, and the migration was completed in less than six months. In addition, Maven Wave rewrote a number of Netezza queries to run efficiently on Google’s BigQuery platform.

Results

Upon migrating to GCP, ADARA observed a 30% reduction in operational cost. Additionally, due to BigQuery’s nearly limitless ability to scale automatically, ADARA is now capable of sustaining long-term growth by providing a platform that can support unlimited travel partners and data channels.