AMD

Company Overview

For more than 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies ― the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible.

Challenge

In the age of cloud-enabled global business, it’s easy to forget that even the most innovative companies still depend on systems based in a single location. If disaster strikes a data center, it can have a serious impact.

AMD faced an extreme version of this problem: the data center that supports its manufacturing processes is located in a tornado area, and any downtime threatened significant disruption to its finely tuned operations. In preparation for tornado season, the company looked for a geo-redundancy solution to help it to keep its systems online and reduce the risk to its manufacturing processes.

To increase geo-redundancy, AMD had begun to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy, which included Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure HDInsight. However, AMD’s use of these solutions was limited, as taking production systems offline to transfer data to the cloud was not an option. With tornado season approaching, AMD looked for a way to replicate its critical data to the Azure cloud without interrupting day-to-day business operations.

Solution

As a first step, the company deployed WANdisco's solution to synchronize its critical business data to an Azure Data Box. The solution replicated the data without requiring system downtime, enabling AMD to operate its business systems as usual during the process. AMD then shipped the Data Box to Microsoft to upload to the Azure cloud, and re-engaged WANdisco's technology to automatically synchronize data that had changed during the shipping process—again, without impacting production systems.

The WANdisco solution now replicates data automatically to the Azure environment, ensuring complete consistency between the on-premises data center and the Azure cloud systems. If the data center is unavailable because of planned or unplanned downtime, service can automatically continue from the Azure environment, without interruption. And because WANdisco's solution manages replication continuously, applications can access current data regardless of location, enabling seamless business operations.