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Smooth Road to System Upgrades

The Teradata Pre-Upgrade Assessment helps you avoid the bumps.

by Mary Pat Simmons, Kevin J. Lewis and Dan Fritz

As organizations increase the use and value of their Teradata environment, they go through hardware and software changes such as upgrades, expansions and migrations to keep their systems vital and healthy. But these actions can produce unexpected outcomes that lead to general performance inconsistencies, workload management challenges or incompatibilities with third-party tools, which may result in scrambling to find a speedy resolution.

To avoid these problems with major hardware and software upgrades, Teradata developed the cross-functional Pre-Upgrade Assessment service that identifies and miti­gates potential risks before changes to the sys­tem occur. This unique service helps upgrades run smoothly from beginning to end.

Confidence Builders

When planning a system upgrade, the Teradata Services Pre-Upgrade Assessment team works with companies to identify and eliminate risk scenarios in advance. The team performs data collection and project analysis and then profiles the upgrade solution from the system environ­ment through system recoverability. The find­ings are presented to the customer along with specific recommendations and action items to pinpoint particular issues and how they should be handled. Having this information in advance enables customers to:

• Understand any potential risks or situ­ations they may encounter
• Analyze the information
• Make informed decisions
• Take any necessary action or deter­mine that there is no risk, or the risk is low enough for the upgrade to proceed without additional action items

A positive growth experience during upgrades, expansions and migrations enables companies to concentrate on their core responsibilities without worrying about their system. In addition, this upgrade process maximizes the availability of the data ware­house that serves daily business operations.

Upgrade Roadmap

The Teradata team uses three steps to assess the customer’s current capabilities, identify gaps and provide information regarding the main areas of concern for system change:

STEP 1: PRE-UPGRADE ASSESSMENT

While the Teradata team performs this assessment, the customer provides access to the system and resources to answer ques­tions. This step includes assessing the base performance data collection, application and workload management, hardware and software compatibility, and Teradata Tools and Utilities scoping and effort. Suggestions for baseline and regression testing, as well as a database version review with recommen­dations for environment compatibility, are also provided.

A baseline is determined by leveraging best-practice scenarios in:

• Environment. The equipment layout and physical conditions within the data center housing the infrastructure, including temperature, airflow, humid­ity and cleanliness
• Infrastructure. IT component assets—the production system, dual systems, backup/archive/restore hardware and software, test/ development, data recovery system, etc.—and the network architecture/configuration connecting them, as well as their compatibility with each other
• Technology. The design of each indi­vidual system, including hardware and software versions, utilities, tools enabled and remote connectivity
• Support levels. Maintenance coverage hours, response times, proactive processes, and availability reporting and analysis
• Operations. Operational procedures and support personnel used in the daily administration and exception handling of the system and database
• Data protection. Processes and features that minimize or eliminate data loss, corruption and theft, including secure support, fallback, hot standby nodes, hot standby disks and large cliques
• Recoverability. Strategies and processes to regularly back up and archive data, and to restore data and functionality in cases of data loss or disaster

STEP 2: COMMUNICATE RESULTS TO THE CUSTOMER

Once the assessment is complete, a rec­ommendation report is shared with the customer to detail any potential problems and outline possible mitigations or resolu­tions. Findings from the assessment could include an identification of project plan opportunities, suggestions for workload management mitigations, commentary on appropriate performance data collection, and any additional upgrade-related information. Before the upgrade or system changes take place, the Teradata team and the customer agree to a joint recommendation on what will be done.

STEP 3: EXECUTE THE AGREED-UPON RECOMMENDATIONS

Once a course of action has been decided, a roadmap is developed to execute the changes based on a strategic plan approved by the customer. This roadmap may include additional items the customer will be responsible for handling but should not automatically be considered for inclu­sion with the Pre-Upgrade service. The intent of these steps is to communicate all findings, even those outside of the scope of the assessment, so the customer has time to react accordingly and determine the appropriate next steps.

Managing Risk

The Teradata Pre-Upgrade Assessment service helps customers ensure their complex hardware and software upgrade, expansion or migration will run smoothly and as planned. The result is maximum availability of the data ware­house during the process and a pain-free growth experience.

Mary Pat Simmons is a Teradata Certified Professional and currently man­ages Teradata Customer Services market­ing programs.

Kevin J. Lewis is director of Teradata Customer Services Global Offer Management and has more than 30 years of experience in the technology field.

Dan Fritz has eight years of experience with Teradata and is the senior product manager for Performance and Systems Management Services.