How a Modern Data Platform Can Power a Future-Ready Digital Business

For the last 5 years, we have seen an incredible amount of new database technologies coming to the market to serve a multitude of application needs. Businesses rely on applications and their databases to drive the customer experience, and as enterprises embrace digital transformation—enabled by technologies, like cloud and AI—software teams are tasked to build, test, deploy, and scale applications more rapidly and cost-effectively than ever before.

With the Delphix 6.0 release, we introduced the virtualization SDK to extend the capabilities of our platform and allow our customers and partners to build plug-ins for any data source, on-premise and/or across every cloud, based on their unique needs that allow them to seamlessly build applications and services for their end users.

This is game-changing for two key reasons: cost-effective development and greater agility with reduced time-to-market for business. Here are two very different examples that further illustrate the impact this is having on enterprise businesses.

When Leaving Your Legacy System Behind is a Costly Decision

Modernizing your data infrastructure has its appeal, but it takes a long time and is costly. Many organizations rely on critical data residing in a variety of long-standing databases, such as Oracle, Db2, and ASE, to run their business-critical applications.

Because data is often trapped in silos and distributed across multiple generations of systems, it creates data entanglements and access challenges across different generations of systems that bottleneck dev teams.

This puts customers in a situation where they need to live with these older systems, without letting them reach their speed or transformation goals. For example, one of our large healthcare insurance customers in Brazil needed to accelerate development of their front-end system application in order to provide to their customers direct access to their services via phone apps and a more user-friendly website.

But they had critical data in their patient insurance claims processing application that relied on a very large, 20-year-old plus Informix database. Rather than letting this become a bottleneck, they teamed with our partners at Experior Tecnologia to quickly build plug-ins using the Delphix virtualization SDK in less than three months.

This allowed the application development and testing teams to self-serve on-demand copies of the Informix databases instantly, rather than relying on the one available database refresh per year. The results were impressive—the customer not only reduced the time in half to bring to market new features but also reduced the capital expenditure for their IT Infrastructure by refreshing their virtual databases on a daily and weekly basis.

The bottom line? They knew that migrating the database to modern technology would require a dramatic change to the application layer and IT infrastructure—an upgrade that was estimated to be in the millions during a two to four year time frame. This was not a risk they wanted to take at this moment in time.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and multiple factors must be considered and carefully analyzed to prevent roadblocks down the road that are difficult to overcome. Luckily, the Delphix virtualization SDK offers a flexible solution that provides better visibility of ROI and TCO (total cost of ownership).

Developing with the Modern Application Stack

Couchbase is a NoSQL document database for interactive web applications. It has a flexible data model, it is easily scalable, and it provides consistently high performance.  Not to mention, it is capable of serving application data with 100% uptime. These were all the ingredients that one of our retail customers needed for a new application that would deliver a better customer experience through their website.

While Couchbase was the perfect solution for the new application, IT Ops was challenged by the lack of knowledge, skills, and infrastructure to be able to serve the application teams efficiently and comply with their SLAs the same way they do with all of the other databases.

To quickly overcome this situation, the customer decided to build and test a Couchbase SDK plug-in and just months later, Delphix was deployed in their production environments, providing application developers and testers the ability to virtualize and provision instant data access from Couchbase.

To date, our partners and customers have developed multiple plugins using the vSDK for mainframe, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS Aurora and RDS, and many more. We’re also providing 100% of its supported capabilities to be used via APIs, and the number of integrations created by the community is impressive. You can see what is available in our marketplace here.

The Need for Data Innovation, Especially in a Crisis

Modern development often involves "fit-for-purpose" data sources. Teams today have greater flexibility to match a specific data store to a specific use case rather than using general-purpose technology for a large number of use cases, but it also drives up the number of databases that an enterprise uses and increases management overhead.

As a platform, our goal is to support all the different sources an enterprise might use for modern development and help bring consistency and standardization to managing those sources using the vSDK. We provide a modern data platform that empowers companies to integrate and wield data across all generations of systems, eliminating dependencies and unlocking the delivery of new digital experiences.

Download this whitepaper to learn how The Delphix Data Platform delivers production-quality data to enterprise stakeholders for all phases of application development.