November 21, 2019 - SnowMirror

With more than 34% market share of the entire global cloud – larger than its next three competitors combined – Amazon Web Services’ position on the market is dominant. AWS offers a wide variety of services, everything from content distribution networks to SQL databases to its wildly popular Elastic Cloud Computing, or EC2.

Some potential SnowMirror users may not realize that it’s possible to replicate ServiceNow data to AWS through the use of a SnowMirror installation on an AWS virtual machine. We caught up recently with SnowMirror Consultant Pavel Müller to discuss the opportunities offered by loading ServiceNow data into AWS – using SnowMirror as an intermediate step.

“Sometimes there’s a misconception that SnowMirror is software that has to be installed on a physical server in a company’s IT infrastructure,” Müller said. “But actually SnowMirror is a Java application, and it can be installed anywhere a virtual machine running Windows Server or Linux is installed, and that includes in cloud instances like AWS,” he added.

AWS offers a wide variety of options for working with SQL databases in the cloud – everything from Microsoft SQL Server running on an EC2 instance or on its Relational Database Service (RDS) to MySQL on RDS or EC2, Müller explained. This is important because SnowMirror uses an SQL server to store data coming from ServiceNow, he added, and this SQL server can be in the cloud.

“What it means is that SnowMirror can run entirely on an AWS cloud if a customer wants to use it that way,” Müller said. “From SnowMirror’s standpoint, it works exactly the same whether it’s installed entirely in a customer’s physical IT infrastructure or entirely in the AWS cloud,” he added.

SnowMirror can be installed on an EC2 instance within minutes, Müller said. What can take longer is data transformation, because the database fields come from SnowMirror unmapped to other applications, and this work may take time depending on what is required.

Once the ServiceNow data is in the AWS cloud, it can be easily analysed by business intelligence applications. BI apps such as Tableau work well in an AWS environment – Tableau Server runs seamlessly on AWS – and it’s fairly straightforward to connect Tableau to Amazon data sources, Müller said.

AWS provides several advantages, including reliability and security, but one of its biggest advantages is flexibility – customers can add or remove capacity as they need it – and this is also true for SnowMirror, Müller explained. “A customer can change the size of their SQL database pretty quickly on AWS,” Müller said, “and SnowMirror can handle that quite stably.”

“Whether a customer wants to run SnowMirror entirely on their physical corporate IT infrastructure, entirely in the cloud, or something in between, we’re more than happy to help meet their requirements,” Müller said.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, please get in touch.

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