Major Global Biotech Company - Accelerated understanding and adoption of AWS RDS for Oracle Database Services

The Customer is the largest independent biotechnology company reaching millions of patients around the world, and developing a pipeline of medicines with breakaway potential. Facing major growth restraint as a result, they chose to move datacenter servers running Oracle databases onto their more dynamic and flexible Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle on the Cloud offered by Amazon Web Services.

While the setup is relatively easy, the very flexibility that adds value to RDS presented users with a multiplicity of options that complicated the configuration for teams not used to the software service. mLogica, with its in-depth experience of both Oracle and AWS platforms, was tasked by the Customer to outline a structured, familiarization exercise that would foster an understanding of Oracle RDS among the Customer’s teams and thereby accelerate the deployment of the service on a companywide basis in a synchronized and unified manner.

As part of the training exercise, the mLogica team laid out four separate configuration scenarios for the Customer’s teams – from local to multi-region. The first scenario was to configure a simple RDS instance running a database engine specifically configured for Oracle. Following a step-by-step process, the Customer’s team was then instructed on the do’s and don’ts of the configuration process, creation of the primary RDS instance as well as the synchronous secondary instance used for backup and failover.

For the third scenario, the team went on to learn how to extend and harden this setup by adding multi-AZ (Availability Zones) setup for rapid failover, adding read replica for read access, offloading and finishing with multi region setup options.

The fourth configuration scenario documented the design, implementation, verification and the respective setup process which covered all areas of security, backup and the different levels of disaster recovery.

The team was also trained using AWS Lambda for database backup, cross-region shipping and automated restore in the target region, as well as introduced to the latest Oracle RDS beta version which will soon implement “native” cross-region failover capabilities, eliminating the need to use lambda functions, and therefore allowing for much better Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives in Disaster Recovery.

Due to mLogica’s step-by-step approach of the entire Oracle RDS process, from the simple initial instance to multi-layered disaster recovery, the Customer’s teams now have a clear understanding and appreciation of the capabilities of AWS RDS and its integration with their Oracle databases. This will enhance and smoothen deployment across multiple regions with total data security and minimal system disruption and rapid recovery options.