Railinc, a key provider of rail data services for North America’s freight rail industry, needed to modernize their data platform and migrate their complex data infrastructure to the cloud. The stakes were high as their data platform supported critical services for the rail industry, requiring a smooth and secure transition.
Railinc faced several challenges:
- Aging Infrastructure: The legacy systems, including Oracle, Teradata, and Hadoop, were becoming costly and inefficient to maintain.
- Complex Data Migrations: They needed to migrate large amounts of data from Greenplum to Snowflake and from Hadoop/Spark to Amazon EMR, all while maintaining data integrity and performance.
- Manual Reporting Systems: Their reporting applications, written in SAS, needed to be refactored to Python and migrated to AWS to increase scalability and reduce manual processing.
Evizi stepped in as a trusted partner, leveraging their expertise in cloud migrations, data platforms, and reporting tools. With a skilled offshore team, Evizi ensured that Railinc’s critical migrations were handled efficiently, with minimal disruption to their operations.
Evizi developed a robust plan for Railinc’s data migration:
- Data Migration: Moving Railinc’s data centers from on-prem servers such as Greenplum to Snowflake.
- Config Migration: Migrating all configurations from on-prem Hadoop and Spark systems to Amazon EMR, while ensuring seamless data processing.
- Reporting Migration: Refactoring 17 applications and 127 programs from SAS to Python and migrating them to AWS for better scalability.
Evizi worked closely with Railinc’s internal teams, setting up clear communication channels and conducting daily reports, demos, and regular stand-up meetings to ensure alignment on the project. Railinc provided data access logs and helped analyze the root causes of any issues.
Without a successful migration, Railinc risked:
- Prolonged downtime or failure of critical data services.
- Increased costs from maintaining aging, inefficient on-prem systems.
- Regulatory issues related to data security and compliance due to outdated infrastructure.
Thanks to Evizi’s careful planning and execution, Railinc successfully migrated its data from Greenplum to Snowflake and its configurations to Amazon EMR. In addition, 17 applications and 127 reporting programs were refactored from SAS to Python and migrated to AWS. This migration improved Railinc’s system performance, scalability, and reporting capabilities, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the rail data industry.