PacketFabric and SADA migrate 30 petabytes of data to GCP at record speed and cost savings

PacketFabric is a next-generation network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform that leverages a 50T+ private optical network, the latest in packet switching technology and end-to-end automation. The company delivers on-demand, private, and secure connectivity services between hundreds of premier colocation facilities and cloud providers across the globe.

Enterprise customers turn to PacketFabric when they outgrow their internet-based connectivity and want to take advantage of multi-cloud computing with direct cloud-to-cloud connectivity. This growth stage often involves moving large volumes of workloads between cloud regions–whether data replication, backup restore, or bulk workflows. Another key driver of business for PacketFabric is the fast growth of modern, distributed applications that require continuous low latency operation across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs), such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and other CSPs, and/or colocation data centers. 

Business challenge

In early 2021, on the recommendation of SADA, PacketFabric was approached by an analytics company that was looking to move to a multi-cloud environment and migrate a sizable amount of data–30 petabytes–from their legacy cloud provider’s storage to Google Cloud Storage. The challenge to the customer was making this transfer happen in a secure, timely, and cost-efficient fashion. 

The analytics company realized that internet-based connectivity was out of the question for multiple reasons. Aside from obvious security and privacy concerns, a major consideration was cost. All cloud providers charge for data egress, and the egress charges from the legacy cloud provider to transport 30 PB of data via their internet backbone would total more than $1.4 million. 

Time was another critical factor. Traversing the internet would have meant taking eight months to a year for the data transfer–an unacceptably long period.

The problematic alternative to the internet was to procure direct connectivity to the cloud provider via a data center or telecom provider, which would have required arranging physical network infrastructure and connectivity, and taken months to provision. Like so many modern, digital IT initiatives that last weeks to months rather than years, spending months to gain connectivity (and potentially be locked into long-term contracts) made no sense for this data migration.

Solution

Not long before the customer engagement, PacketFabric had launched a new product called Cloud Router, which allows customers to provision multi-cloud connectivity between CSPs across the PacketFabric network in minutes, without requiring any physical connectivity or infrastructure. Cloud Router supports multi-100G connectivity and stringent SLA-backed performance for predictable, high throughput. Furthermore, though it is a carrier-class connectivity service, Cloud Router is offered on a monthly basis like SaaS, making it easy to consume for shorter or longer-term needs.

“Given the customer’s desire to establish high-speed multi-cloud networking quickly, Cloud Router was the perfect fit, especially when combined with SADA’s GCP expertise. Traditionally, moving data to or between clouds has been difficult, time-consuming, and cost prohibitive. So we were excited for the opportunity to help achieve this ambitious goal.”

David McClean | Senior Solutions Architect and Team Lead at PacketFabric

To better enable multi-cloud environments, PacketFabric has API-automated direct connections with all of the major CSPs. When enterprises move data over PacketFabric’s high-capacity backbone, they benefit automatically from the lower rates that CSPs offer via their hosted direct connectivity. Because its layer-2 backbone is private, it doesn’t touch the public internet–adding an extra level of security. In addition, the Cloud Router solution allows customers to use a single portal or REST API to create private connections to multiple clouds, colocation data centers, and even SaaS apps, rather than contracting separately with many different providers.

SADA, a three-time Google Cloud Reseller Partner of the Year, went all in to provide technical account management and professional services to help move the 30 PB of client data to GCP.

“SADA got directly involved with the client engineering team, ensuring that the project plan, customer configurations, and expectations were clear. That level of care makes a huge difference in delivering a complete solution to customers.”

Lex Saulus | Channel Development Executive at PacketFabric

Results

The combined capabilities of PacketFabric, SADA, and Google Cloud enabled them to move the 30 PB of customer data via Cloud Router 100Gbps connections in five months. In addition, the data migration cost was reduced from $1.4M to roughly $600,000.

In summary, SADA, Google Cloud, and PacketFabric helped their mutual client:

• Cut migration costs by 53%, saving $826,000 
• Decrease migration time from one year to 5 months
• Deploy a fast, flexible, and easy-to-use solution engineered by industry experts
• Leverage the Cloud Router point-to-point solution to instantly create a secure connection

The successful outcome for this particular customer forged a strong partnership. PacketFabric is one of the first members of SADA’s new SaaS Alliance Program, an industry-leading initiative aimed at helping independent software vendors (ISVs) and SaaS organizations scale their businesses faster and maximize the value of their partnership with Google Cloud. “We’ve had synergy with SADA since day one,” said Saulus. “Together, we created a bundled solution for other mutual customers combining PacketFabric’s Cloud Router solutions with SADA’s vast offerings and engineering services.”