Case Study
Modernization of the Strategic Database Enhances Overall Application Performance and Business Availability
The customer is one of the customs authorities in UAE controlling & regulating customs laws thus playing a vital role in contributing to the national economy by virtue of revenue collected in the form of import & other taxes and duties. The customer aims at rendering the best customs services for traders and passengers with the vision of enhancing customs security and facilitation of trade with very strong values including foresight and innovation.
Background
The customer was using Oracle 10g with Oracle failsafe (Active-Passive Cluster) which had low latency and degraded the overall performance of the application. Further, an increase in the number of users led to service disruption and downtime due to the inability to handle business workloads. During business peak hours, many users were experiencing slowness in the application. This was resulting in high dissatisfaction and lower employee productivity. The customer needed an expert to help perform the migration, maintain uninterrupted business operations and application performance during the infrastructure upgrade.
Challenges
- High downtime and data loss
- Poor user experience due to application slowness
- Reduced employee productivity
Technology
- Oracle RAC
Solution
NTS implemented Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) at primary site as HA solution and migrated customer’s Oracle databases to new RAC environment & build a standalone database with ASM at DR site as a Disaster Recovery solution.
Solution
NTS dedicated certified database architects on Oracle RAC for the primary role of streamlining the Oracle database migration process and managing the operational performance during and after the migration.
Oracle RAC allows customers to have Active/Active Oracle clustering. If a clustered server fails, the Oracle database will continue running on the surviving servers. Further, it allows customers to run a single Oracle Database across multiple servers in order to maximize availability and enable horizontal scalability, while accessing shared storage. User sessions connecting to Oracle RAC instances can failover and safely replay changes during outages, without any changes to end user applications, hiding the impact of the outages from end users.
NTS also proposed to implement a DR solution that becomes vital in scenarios like flood, earthquake or any hardware failure at the main site. DR is very important to continue the business without data loss.
NTS team was responsible for performance monitoring, remediating issues that caused operational inefficiencies and implementing best practices for data security. Once the migration was successful, the team tested the performance of databases in the new Oracle RAC Database environment and made sure that all applications were compatible with the upgraded platform.
Next, our team set up a secure go-live environment, performing security testing and an architecture risk analysis to identify any vulnerabilities and loopholes that might have existed on the development side.
The successful database migration and infrastructure upgrade translated into improved overall performance in the new system. The experienced team of NTS professionals enabled a smooth migration engagement, maintaining uninterrupted application access, data integrity, and security during the transition. Our professional services ensured the ongoing functionality of legacy applications in the new environment, acting as a trusted advisor and partner throughout the entire IT modernization project.
Outcome
- Reduced workload of the Operations & Finance department thus improving overall efficiency.
- Application developers can now connect to any database instance in the cluster without making any changes to the application thus reducing the downtime.
- Disaster Protection
- Protection against database corruption