Oracle Cloud Migration
Challenges
- Complex customized, private virtual environment
- Multiple cloned databases
- Running several versions behind current Oracle database version
Outcomes
- Simplified processing environment
- Migrated to the Cloud
- Reduced Oracle licensing costs and costs associated with maintaining multiple environments
- Completed in less than six months
“We’re extremely thankful for Neovera’s partnership in our migration to the Cloud. They are a tremendous source of Oracle knowledge and were available day and night, tirelessly doing what needed to be done. We were fortunate to have them with us during this exercise.”
-Chief Technology Officer
CLIENT OVERVIEW
Providing royalty solutions for sound recordings and publishing, this company collects and distributes digital performance royalties on behalf of recording artists’ and master rights owners’ accounts.
THE CHALLENGE
Their production database generates royalty payments on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly schedule employing multiple workflows from multiple data streams. Utilizing custom in-house processes, they had cloned their database environment into QA and development environments, with different Oracle Business Intelligence configurations for reporting and statement generation.
The virtual environment included servers configured to support Oracle databases in several environments. Those databases were running numerous versions behind the most current database version.
Ready to renew the licenses for the databases and analytics tools, they wanted to make a number of additional changes.
Those upgrades included moving to the newest Oracle database release and migrating from a private infrastructure to a Cloud provider, while maintaining existing functionality and reducing their Oracle licensing costs as well as the operational costs associated with maintaining multiple environments.
NEOVERA SOLUTION
Initially, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was considered as a potential provider, as they were utilizing AWS in a number of other areas. However, for reasons including time-to-migrate, performance and risks involved with code rewrites and data migration, they were exploring alternatives. They had also considered hosting the Oracle databases on AWS, but ultimately decided to migrate to the Oracle Cloud as a platform incorporating the Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle Analytics Cloud because of the cost savings achieved in the Oracle Cloud and the features included with the Oracle Autonomous Database.
Neovera was already managing and maintaining their environment. We began to explore migration by performing a proof-of-concept on the Oracle Cloud, completing it in a fraction of the time of the AWS proof-of-concept, with little to no risk of data and code migration from the existing environment. The client chose us to lead the migration efforts because of our knowledge of the existing environment and Oracle database management and migration services as well as our expertise exhibited in the proof-of-concept.
The client wanted to be fully operational in the Oracle Cloud by end of 2020, which was less than six months from inception to completion. We partnered to develop a detailed migration strategy focused on a near real time go-live cutover and the operational changes required on the go-live date. During the first phase, we included a parallel run of processes on the Oracle Cloud and the existing production runs. This included configuring a replicated database and maintaining near-real time replication between the databases, with all extract, transform, load processes and reporting fully tested and compared with their on-premises production data.
After migration, we assisted with a number of post-migration activities. These included improvements to data processing; operational tasks for cloning databases on demand; managing alert notifications; scaling production database capacity on demand; and automating the processes for data replicated from Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to AWS storage.
BOTTOM-LINE RESULTS
The overall success of the migration was highlighted when the go-live cutover was performed in less than four hours with no disruption to their scheduled business processes. In addition to simplifying their virtual environment and bringing them up to the current Oracle database versions, the migration reduced the processing times for a number of data intensive processes from days to a little over a few hours. Project outcomes included environment management cost savings, reduced database storage requirements, scalable infrastructure for peak workloads and the addition of capabilities for self-service, on-demand database refreshes for development and testing environments.