Converting Enterprise Vertica to Eon
If you are considering this move, Congratulations! You are headed in the right direction. Eon mode is a giant leap forward for Vertica.
Eon advances Vertica cluster architecture in several major ways.
Firstly, Enterprise mode clusters have data stored in the actual nodes. You’ll have to do some capacity planning. It’s very important to accurately estimate the node size (memory, cpu, disk etc.) that is enough to store and retrieve data in the desired time. Alternatively, Eon Mode stores data in a shared object store called communal storage. This greatly simplifies planning for hardware resources. This is especially useful in cloud environments.
Secondly, data replication tactics in Enterprise mode greatly depend on your K-safety setting. This too requires smart capacity planning and changes performance depending on the number of nodes in your Vertica cluster. The higher the K-safety number, the higher the number of nodes involved in replication which leads to more maintenance.
With regard to elastic scalability, database size has virtually no limit in Eon. You can keep adding as much data as you wish without having to add new nodes. Data replication in AWS is inherent in S3 which lowers risk with Vertica data. Therefore your EBS costs are much lower than they ordinarily would be. All the maintenance and complexity associated with data replication disappears immediately in Eon.
There will always be a cost to make Enterprise Vertica available even when you don’t need it during certain times of the day or night. You can make some limited adjustment but it’s not very elastic in nature especially when it comes to scaling down. You are always paying since you must keep minimum number of nodes at any point of time to maintain your K-safety.
Eon shines in this area as well. You can literally scale down to zero nodes during quiet periods.
Another beautiful feature that you would fall in love with is optimization of resources in a way that querying and writing data is without impacting load on its performance. Workloads in Eon can be isolated to a subset of nodes.
Migrating existing Enterprise clusters to Eon can be challenging. However the advantages are worth it. With Eon there is far less risk of dealing with downtime issues that are typical of those sometimes found on an Enterprise mode cluster node. You may have dealt with some of those issues in the past. If so, you know that resolving them required spending a lot of time trying to troubleshoot, cluster recreation, copy from DR clusters, and general frustration. We have automated many of those procedures in ElasticDW, but EON reduces the risk and overhead. In addition, for some of our clusters we were able to reduce the number of Vertica nodes with no loss of performance or availability. In one case we were able to reduce our AWS costs down to a third — $2400/month to $800/month.
That specific installation was a three node Enterprise cluster converted into a one node Eon cluster. In this particular use case we had two clusters in an decoupled active-active configuration, and reducing k-safety was not a concern — we can always restore from the other cluster if one goes down (or rebuild from scratch from the data lake using our Pitbull architecture).
Here are some tips on how to make the conversion to Eon mode simpler. We have executed the Enterprise to Eon transition for most of our customers’ production workloads, and countless times on our own. In an upcoming release of ElasticDW, we will make this conversion a one click step.
To set context:
Source: Existing Vertica database in Enterprise mode. (3 node cluster) Target: New Vertica database in Eon mode. (1 node cluster)
These are the basic steps to convert Vertica from Enterprise to Eon:
SELECT 'CONNECT TO VERTICA my_database USER dbadmin PASSWORD ''XXX'' ON ''SOURCE_IP_ADDRESS'',5433;' union all (select 'select ''copying....' || schema_name || '.' || table_name || '''; ' || 'COPY ' || schema_name || '.' || table_name || ' FROM VERTICA my_database.' || schema_name || '.' || table_name || ' DIRECT;' from ALL_TABLES where schema_name not like 'v_%' and table_type='TABLE' order by schema_name);
That’s all there is to it. You’ve got yourself an Eon cluster!
My take away …
We can help you convert your Enterprise to Eon as well.
I recommend using www.elasticdw.com. You get all Eon/Enterprise related task done in pretty much no time and with zero maintenance on your side.
