Pythian supports Mapp Digital in their cloud strategy

Customer Success

Pythian supports Mapp Digital in their cloud strategy 

Blue Hornet (now Mapp Digital) needed to migrate from an in-house data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud. Pythian provided oversight, from initial consultations through migration testing, and implementation. 

Overview

Mapp Digital
Industries
Advertising & Marketing
Case Study File:
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Mapp Digital is one of the world’s largest independent digital marketing technology companies. Their customer-centric marketing platform combines email, mobile, and social marketing, leveraging an integrated data management platform. Headquartered in San Diego, Mapp supports more than 3,000 customers worldwide across a broad range of industries. Top brands include PepsiCo, KFC, Thomas Cook, Deutsche Telekom, Xerox, and Lloyds Banking Group. 

Mapp Digital’s Customer Engagement Platform is storing and utilizing large volumes of data. To increase the performance of the platform specifically during peak times, refresh the current hardware platform, and consolidate different databases, Mapp Digital decided to look at going with a virtualized server model for their eMS product (former Blue Hornet Platform).  

With Pythian’s help they landed on AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (E2C) for hosting their Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS) and AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) for their MySQL database management system. Given the breadth of Mapp Digital’s customer base, the sheer size of the Oracle RDBMS was daunting—more than 50 TB. All the transactional client data of Blue Hornet’s eMS customers needed to be transplanted smoothly to AWS, maintaining strict data privacy and security mechanisms. Having enough storage was a serious consideration. So was ongoing management in the cloud and minimizing outages. It was essential that the migration be carefully planned to ensure minimal downtime and a clean data transfer of the very large database.  

Pythian had been providing managed services to Mapp Digital since 2010, so they were the natural choice for a services partner. 

What we did

  • The Pythian Database Services team helped Mapp Digital navigate the whole process, from initial consultations on the feasibility of AWS through developing and implementing a migration plan, then performing testing 
  • Helped evaluate multiple options, including sharding, migration strategies, and performance comparisons 
  • Provided cutover testing and escalation assistance—and continues to monitor the database environments for outages while making recommendations on configurations for optimizing availability, and opportunities to save on cost 
  • Pythian experts drew on previous experience with other clients to ensure that Mapp worked within the appropriate parameters of AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) to avoid creating a fragile configuration 

Technologies used

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (E2C) 
  • Amazon® Relational Database Service (RDS) 
  • Amazon® Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Oracle RDBMS 
  • MySQL 

Key Outcomes

Pythian has been supporting our databases for multiple years and knows the complexities and requirements specific to our environment. Collaborating with Pythian, we were able to successfully plan, evaluate, test, and migrate our databases from an on-site data center to AWS Cloud.

– Dean Smith, Director IT Operations, Mapp Digital 


Minimal downtime. The cutover from in-house company data centers to AWS was completed on schedule and went smoothly 


Operating at twice the speed with newer, more powerful hardware in the cloud 

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