HD Supply, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Home Depot, is a leading wholesale distribution company serving customers and their communities across the Multifamily, Institutional, Hospitality, Trades, Government Housing, Healthcare, Building Services and Education industries through an expansive network of over 100 distribution centers across the U.S. & Canada.

In 2020, HD Supply was acquired by The Home Depot, And although HD Supply and HD Pro are separate entities, both function as one team that serves customers of The Home Depot. In the early beginnings of the integration, associates shared customer and supply chain data between the two companies’ Snowflake accounts in Microsoft Azure. But when the business decided to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as its primary cloud platform, consolidating and migrating both accounts without business disruption became a priority. HD Supply used account replication and failover features powered by Snowgrid, Snowflake’s cross-region, cross-cloud technology layer, to complete the consolidation and cross-cloud migration in less than 60 days—achieving 30% savings in data transfer costs in the process. 

Consolidation in Azure

HD Supply Senior Architect Robert O’Dowd started the process by consolidating HD Pro and HD Supply’s Snowflake accounts in Azure. While 5 TBs of data in 2,000 tables was replicated from the HD Pro account into the HD Supply account, in parallel Snowflake enabled data sharing to continue between the accounts. Periodic replication reduced the time for the final cutover to under 30 minutes. There was zero downtime on both source and target accounts with no disruptions, making the process both efficient and cost-effective. Once O’Dowd’s team completed the replication process, they used Snowflake’s account failover features to conduct a planned failover of the complete HD Pro account to the consolidated HD Supply account. 

“The entire consolidation process could have taken months to manually identify specific data sets on both sides of the company that needed to be shared, set up, and then loaded into HD Supply,” says O’Dowd. “With Snowflake’s automation, we were able to load everything into the account in a couple of weeks, and share data with the click of a button.” 

Migration from Azure to GCP

To migrate from Azure to GCP, O’Dowd again used Snowflake’s cross-cloud Snowgrid, which provides organizations with one seamless and connected experience across clouds to easily replicate data for improved business continuity. 

O’Dowd’s team needed to migrate 20 TBs of data across 25 databases on different clouds with little to no impact to data consumers. First, they set up a new Snowflake account in GCP. They then used new account failover groups to replicate account objects from Azure, and did periodic replications for testing to make sure everything worked correctly in GCP before conducting a final failover to the GCP instance of Snowflake. The final failover group setup and initial replication was performed in a single day. Snowflake features have the same functionality across clouds, so there was little to no impact to data consumers. 

“Using account failover allowed us to minimize downtime as we migrated to the Snowflake GCP instance,” says O’Dowd. “We were able to have the GCP instance in secondary mode and do our testing. When we did the final failover, it was almost instantaneous to users, making the whole migration process rather seamless.»

Benefits of using Snowgrid

HD Supply gained a number of benefits using Snowgrid’s replication and failover features, including:

  • Efficiency and cost savings: Automated syncing across primary and secondary accounts and cloud providers removed the operational burden of manually migrating. The company realized 30% cost savings through doing replication in Snowflake versus unloading and transferring data manually. 
  • Speed: The company completed data sharing in Azure in 2 weeks versus a few months, and completed the migration from Azure to GCP in less than 60 days because replication was easy to set up, configure, and execute.
  • Little to no downtime or disruption to business: Data consumers were able to access data easily and consistently throughout the process. 

Learn more about how your company can migrate across cloud platforms with speed, efficiency, and minimal to no disruption with Cross-Cloud Snowgrid.