Planful Success Story

cloud optimization case studies - Planful

Planful, provides cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) applications for planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics. Its EPM suite includes:

  • Planning Cloud that enables to build budgeting, modeling, and reporting plans all in one place
  • Close Management Cloud for enterprise-level consolidation and reporting
  • Reporting Cloud, a drag-and-drop report writer, and automated publisher
  • Analytics Cloud, a cloud-based analytics
  • Cloud Platform for finance with security, compliance, and integration.

The company also offers Oracle Hyperion Migration Program for migrating from Hyperion into Planful, including key infrastructures, such as accounts, security, and integration; Sales Planning solution for revenue forecasts by integrating sales pipeline data with financial data; and Health Check solution to optimize the EPM application, from integration and data loading to reports, modeling, template design, and more. In addition, it offers implementation, consulting, and education services. The company serves customers worldwide. The company was founded in 2000 and is based in Redwood City, California with additional offices around the world.

Case scenario & challenge

Scenario

“Project Hercules” primarily supports how Planful managed backups of customer data to ensure both the ability to restore information for customers as well as increase retention time for the data. All in conjunction with reducing overall costs for this functionality.

Challenge and Risk

Planful contractually held 28 days of back-ups of customer data (as defined in their standard customer MSA).  Increasingly, many of our customers had asked for an increase in this term to 60 or 90 days of retention. This resulted in data volume growth and drove storage costs up. Planful needed an alternate solution that would allow for an increase in data retention, accommodate for warm and cold backup types, and decrease costs.

Solution & Design

Kaizen Technical Partners teamed with Planful to design a solution that utilized local storage, S3, and Glacier. We created a 7- / 30- / 60- day rotational method for customer data that allowed for longer retention time, faster restoration times, and a huge decrease in overall costs – from $1.73/GB to $0.03/GB. The team set up a Direct Connect line from the customer’s data center to the AWS data center in order to have the best connection, security, and free data transfer IN.

The collaborative team also made Cross-Region Replication for S3 buckets in Oregon to North Virginia Region to make sure customers have full redundancy of their data and also a Disaster Recovery Solution in the cloud.

By backing up data from local to AWS Cloud, the team also create a Disaster Recovery solution for customers. Data can be easily restored to the data center in within an hour. Compare to the customer’s RTO: 4 hours, then this solution has greatly improved performance.

AWS Services in use

  • S3 with Cross-Region Replication
  • Glacier
  • Direct Connect

Third-Party applications used

  • Nimble Storage for Storage in Data Center
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Log Replication
  • SQL Sentry for monitoring and replication consistency checks

Business Benefit

  • Kaizen Team were now able to offer up to 60 days of data retention to our customers to meet their needs
  • Kaizen Team were able to reduce costs by 98% with no changes in infrastructure, no Capital Expenditure
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn