How a global tech manufacturer migrated its Oracle DB to Amazon RDS

The VP at a global tech manufacturer was to the point: One of its groups needed to migrate most of its Oracle servers to AWS. The ask came directly from the IT director, and it was urgent. The organization needed help.

The organization was keen to consolidate resources and leverage public cloud technology to be more cost effective. At the same time, adopting the public cloud would move the organization closer toward its ultimate goal of having a more open-source platform and building out a high-availability/redundant environment.

It was a straightforward but not exactly a small job, as the total scope would involve migrating roughly 50 workloads to the cloud and creating a new solution to accommodate staff augmentation.

While some companies of this size have AWS experience, they don’t necessarily have all the knowledge they need. This tech manufacturer needed a partner it could trust; one that understood legacy compliance and governance protocols and had a clearly defined methodology for migrating applications to the cloud.

As it turns out, the manufacturer already had that partner. It just didn’t know it yet.

A hardware and software provider with vast cloud expertise

Over a 20-year partnership, the tech manufacturer had relied on SHI for software and hardware. It wasn’t until recently that it became aware of SHI’s cloud service capabilities and set up an introductory phone call between its cloud architects and SHI’s cloud team.

After several weeks of discussions with SHI’s Cloud and Innovative Solutions (CIS) team, the manufacturer was confident that its longtime partner was the right partner for the job.

How to move to the cloud fast

The organization had more than 210 TB of data to migrate to the cloud. Given the urgency of the project, the organization needed a way to move all that data securely without the long transfer times typically associated with migrations. SHI leveraged a newer technology, AWS Snowball, to quickly transfer the data to AWS.

SHI helped the manufacturer migrate an application called Zenergy and built 20 EC2 instances from the bottom up.

SHI also successfully migrated the company’s Oracle Database to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), moving the 50 workloads onto it.

But the migration was just the start. The company had to get up to speed on AWS to maximize its investment.

On-site training to aid the transition to the cloud

The manufacturer didn’t merely want its workloads moved to the cloud, it wanted its employees to understand the changes. What’s actually going into the migration? How can employees better leverage the new infrastructure?

A member of SHI’s CIS Solutions team joined the company on-site for 30 days during the engagement, providing whiteboarding sessions around the transition from Oracle DB on Linux to AWS RDS.

The beauty of a full-service solution

The tech manufacturer recognized the value of migrating to the cloud and has already seen significant cost savings.

Oftentimes, companies want to move to the cloud, but know they don’t have the resources in house to achieve their goals. SHI not only moved this organization’s workloads and data to the cloud, but aided the transition with on-the-ground support. As more organizations migrate to the cloud, that full-service approach makes the journey much easier.

Matthew Martin, Guy Pirro, and Todd Wolf contributed to this post.