On-premise, cloud or hybrid? Discover your data infrastructure options with TimeXtender

There are many considerations when it comes to your data infrastructure. Are you moving fully to the cloud? Do you want a hybrid setup, or is it important that data processing takes place on-premises on physical servers? Depending on your company's goals and needs, you have to think about tooling that supports your choice. With our clients we like to work with the TimeXtender data management platform for all three infrastructure options, because it offers options for all three. It also makes it possible to move from on-premises or hybrid to the cloud. Curious about the possibilities for a data infrastructure with TimeXtender? Read on.

TimeXtender

TimeXtender is a data warehouse automation solution that lets you build your data foundation in an automated way. TimeXtender orchestrates your infrastructure from the source systems all the way to your data products. This means all your data is collected and processed in one central place. This makes it easier to guarantee one version of the truth and to use this data in data products such as apps, portals and analytics dashboards in, for example, Qlik or Power BI. Because TimeXtender can move with the resources you have at your disposal, there are many possibilities, and therefore many considerations. Below we describe a few situations and recommendations.

Which infrastructure suits us?

Once you are enthusiastic about the possibilities of managing your data platform with TimeXtender, the question quickly arises which type of infrastructure goes with it. TimeXtender can handle architectures ranging from fully on-premises to hybrid and fully cloud-based.

Figure 1 Infrastructure choices per layer

Because you tell TimeXtender which resources to use to store, transport and manipulate data, you can also change these along the way and thereby migrate from one infrastructure to another. This makes it easy to move your data platform from an on-premises installation to the cloud, for example.

The question of which setup to choose thus becomes a lot less loaded: it is much easier to change your choice of components and location afterwards. This means TimeXtender can adapt to the way your organization works, rather than the other way around.

On-premises

When all of your business infrastructure runs on-premises, it may be obvious to set up your data platform there as well. In that case you choose to store your data lake and data warehouse layers in a SQL Server instance on a virtual machine, and in a compact setup you can place TimeXtender alongside it. Depending on the BI solutions you want to support, you may already be done. For optimal support with Power BI it is wise to use SQL Server Analysis Services to host data marts; Tableau and Qlik require no additional infrastructure beyond their own system.

Hybrid

Perhaps your source systems run on-premises, but you want to run your data platform in the cloud, for example so that your IT department does not have to manage the resources or because you want to use Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. In that case you can adopt a hybrid architecture: sources on-premises, data platform in Azure, for instance. The only important consequence is that you need to consider the bandwidth of the network connection between your on-premises network and Azure, which will usually be more limited than when you run your data platform on-premises in the same network as your source systems. Another example is to keep all data up to and including your modern data warehouse on-premises and move your semantic endpoints to the cloud.

Lift-and-shift

If the organization starts on-premises and later adopts a cloud policy, you simply point TimeXtender to the new components and switch over. That way you lift-and-shift your data and infrastructure to the cloud. In general, you can also use TimeXtender as a tool to migrate databases from on-premises to the cloud.

Cloud

Because TimeXtender uses the Microsoft Data Stack, it integrates very well with the PaaS services Microsoft offers in Azure. Of course, you can also purchase components such as SQL Server from other cloud providers. Depending on the number of sources to be connected, the need to facilitate data science and advanced analytics, and the performance you want to deliver, you can make different choices between the main elements of a cloud infrastructure: Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Lake make it possible to connect many more sources in parallel, Azure Synapse Analytics makes it possible to query gigantic tables more efficiently and integrates well with many of the tools aimed at advanced analytics, and Azure SQL Hyperscale delivers a good balance between cost and storage size.

If your organization already has a foothold in Azure, it is easy to set up TimeXtender there too. The Azure Marketplace templates make it even easier to get started.
Want to read more about Azure in combination with TimeXtender (and Power BI)? Then read this blog.

The next step

Once you have an idea of the main components you want to include in your architecture, it is time to draw up a more detailed design and try out what TimeXtender brings you. As Partner of the Year, E-mergo is the ideal expert to assist you in taking the next step in data warehouse automation!