Fortune 250 Transportation Giant Achieves Significant Cost Savings on its Databases

The Company

The Fortune 250 transportation giant, together with its subsidiaries, is one of the leading transportation suppliers in the US. The company's rail and intermodal businesses provide rail-based transportation services, including traditional rail services and the transport of intermodal containers and trailers.

The company developed an aggressive plan to exit its data centers by moving its critical workloads into Azure in a 2-year window as a key transformational goal from their new CIO and CEO. As part of their initial analysis, the Oracle, Mainframe, and SAP databases were the most significant and challenging environments to move into the Cloud.  The powerful partnerships with Tessell promoted confidence within them to migrate all production and non-prod 570 Oracle Databases to Azure Infrastructure while providing a platform for long-term modernization by meeting their critical technical and business requirements.

The Challenge

The company’s Oracle databases were scheduled to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) since, initially, Microsoft's capabilities did not meet their needs when the original MACC agreement was signed. Upon testing the OCI interconnect, they discovered significant latency challenges with applications in Azure connecting to the OCI database, causing the company to reevaluate its approach.

The company wanted to optimize the total cost of ownership for managing its Oracle database fleet with a particular focus on:

• Migrating Oracle into cloud infrastructure with resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Modernize Oracle workloads and provide long-term options to move onto open-source databases.
• Offer the same availability as on-premises but at a lower cost, including Oracle licenses.
• Remove and/or reduce complexity, costs, governance, and security related to managing multiple cloud environments.

The primary objective was to migrate on-premises data center applications via AVS to Azure within 18 months and fully exit within two years.

Proof of Concept

• A series of proof of concepts (POCs) demonstrated that Tessell’s Oracle on Azure IaaS solution could meet the company's recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) while also offering superior total cost of ownership (TCO).
• The company’s buy-in was achieved after witnessing the potential for future cost savings for licensing, DBA support, and optimization, securing executive sponsorship from Microsoft to ensure successful implementation, and understanding an effective migration mitigation plan to reduce risks.
• Microsoft Partner Tessell delivered a comprehensive licensing, support, and infrastructure planning and implementation assessment to ensure an end-to-end migration of Oracle to Azure.
• Tessell also addressed the company’s inquiries and concerns regarding Oracle licensing, contracting, and support policies specific to Oracle on Azure.
• With the help of Tessell, the customer successfully upheld compliance standards and retained authority over Oracle licenses.

The Solution

The solution chosen was a fully managed database service from Tessell, which handles customer data infrastructure and data management requirements for Oracle Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2.

• Tessell teamed with Microsoft to conduct a comprehensive Oracle estate analysis, evaluating factors including database sizing, resiliency, performance, and cost. This resulted in a strong recommendation for the Oracle on Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) option.
• Tessell undertook a TCO exercise to outline the customer benefits. The resulting future proposed Oracle on Azure architecture provided a sound path for the overall migration and modernization strategy.
• Tessell consolidated multiple databases and optimized Oracle licenses, right-sizing Azure infrastructure comparable to the customer’s existing Oracle on-premise RAC experience.

Moreover, Tessell's Managed Services Oracle on Azure platform facilitates a PaaS-like experience through Terraform automation, optimization of Oracle licenses, and reduced database administrator (DBA) reliance. This is achieved through ready-to-deploy automation scripting and pipeline optimizations, leaving a lasting impression on the company’s leadership.

The Results

The customer found a true database modernization partner in Tessell. Tessell seamlessly migrated 500+ Oracle databases from on-premise to the cloud of the customer’s choice. Tessell’s fully managed database service covered all the database operations the DBAs manually performed at the company. With Tessell’s unique ability to consolidate multiple databases on a single server, the customer could reduce their infrastructure spend by 40% and reduce their license spend by 30%, including the retirement of Oracle RAC licenses. Additionally, leveraging Tessell’s Availability Machine app and its built-in functionality of managing native RMAN backups, the customer could eradicate third-party backup software licenses. Overall, Tessell delivered significant value to the customer, making Tessell a clear winner.