Global Financial Services Company - IBM Mainframe Migration to Oracle Exadata

The Customer is a leading global financial services corporation with the need to migrate database and data from their existing legacy Db2 mainframe platform to Oracle Exadata 12c to achieve better operational efficiencies and business outcomes. The Customer elected to migrate to Oracle Exadata for reliable database performance, scalability, and reliability. This would enable the Customer to enhance data agility and speed in response to rapidly changing customer requirements by: a) adding products and services quickly, b) making customer-facing applications more responsive and c) accelerating process speed to allow for thousands of simultaneous transactions and instant data updates across multi-jurisdictional use points.

mLogica was retained to assist with the bulk data movement and migration. By initially investigating and solving issues within their current Oracle GoldenGate environment, mLogica was able to ensure a successful real-time data capture and delivery between the source system and the target system during the migration.

mLogica implemented an Oracle migration methodology for an end-to-end source to target migration. Using mLogica’s Automated Migration Studio (STAR*M) to simplify and automate data processes, the team was able to quickly and easily convert database code and data from the source.

A mLogica data migration architect and GoldenGate product specialist led the migration project by starting a comprehensive assessment of Customer’s objectives and expectations followed by an analysis of database objects and structures, and finalizing the migration strategy. The objective was to access the client’s environment remotely and migrate database objects and data with minimal impact on availability and functionality of the system, while maintaining data integrity. The Customer provided secure VPN access to their environment to carry out remote work. The allotted outage window was 10 hours over the weekend, over a 10 GigE network pipe.

The project moved to the analysis phase, which comprised of the migration assessment, analysis of database objects, structures and procedures for conversion, review of interfaces and scripts, analysis of application migration, assistance with testing, and development of final migration strategy. The mLogica team then configured the target environment by translating database structures and objects, remediating interfaces and scripts, assistance with testing, and then porting data from source to target.

The final project phase involved setting up primary and secondary runs, and addressing any issues on both environments via: a) system integration testing to verify the behavior of the entire system and its compliance with specified requirements; b) preparation of deployment-ready environment with informal training and knowledge transfer; and c) user acceptance testing to verify if the applications could handle the required tasks in real-world scenarios.

The mLogica team finalized the project by providing continued testing and post migration support, as well as knowledge transfer, and performance and tuning. By utilizing mLogica’s automated migration approach, the Customer yielded resource savings across all phases of the migration by keeping project cost low, optimizing resources efficiently, and completing the data migration within a reasonable timeline.

The Customer experienced a performance improvement of 52.5% over their previous IBM mainframe environment. Since the Oracle migration, the Customer’s development team is now focused on delivering new capabilities rather than fighting performance issues. Moving to Oracle Exadata 12c has also improved cost efficiencies and reduced maintenance activities, both of which has helped mitigate business risk.