Oracle: 20 TB in one weekend

Most of the highly specialized Oracle Advanced Support Engineers are based directly on the SAP campus in Walldorf, but they also work in Palo Alto, Shanghai and Tokyo.

Together with their Oracle colleagues at other international locations, they have around 300 years of experience with Oracle/SAP environments.

"We recently migrated a 20-terabyte database for a large customer in a single weekend and also compressed it by 70 percent. In the past, something like this would have taken much longer and required several additional downtimes"

says Michael Weick.

He is responsible for special support for SAP users at Oracle. His exact title is long: Director Advanced Customer Services at the Oracle Center of Expertise for SAP. Thousands of customers around the world use SAP applications on platforms consisting of Oracle hardware and huge Oracle databases.

SAP is therefore not only a competitor in the field of ERP solutions, but has also been an important Oracle partner for 28 years and is even one of the largest resellers of Oracle products worldwide.

Advanced Customer Service (ACS) for SAP is therefore an important organization for both Oracle and SAP, ensuring that customers can operate the products of both companies smoothly.

The team not only provides services for the Oracle ACS portfolio, but also supports SAP directly in customer support; the group is responsible worldwide for so-called "Development Support at SAP" (last level support).

Oracle and SAP knowledge

The ACS Center of Expertise for SAP has developed a whole range of services that proactively help customers to use their Oracle and SAP solutions optimally and securely. Michael Weick explains what is involved:

"As part of ACS annual contracts and individual orders, we regularly examine our customers' systems for potential risks and weaknesses, train users in workshops and develop specific suggestions for improvement. Well-known group-wide SAP customers have been relying on our expertise for years."

Users who operate large, business-critical databases should always prepare a migration carefully in order to avoid risks - be it when switching to a new version, new hardware or a new operating system.

Specialists know where potential dangers lurk and how they can be avoided. However, as migrations are not a routine job, many companies lack experts and experience in dealing with suitable tools and processes.

The SAP-certified Oracle Migration Service from ACS specializes in the secure and efficient transfer of databases. It moves huge amounts of data, even larger than 20 terabytes, quickly and easily within a weekend.

And it gets even better: the upgrade to a new database version or a significant compression can also be carried out at the same time. The team offers two technical methods: offline, while the SAP application is stopped, or online with almost no downtime in a so-called "Close to Zero Downtime Migration" while the SAP application is online.

This online method is popular with customers who want to migrate the entire database - regardless of size - to a new infrastructure within two to three hours. The data is not simply copied over the network, but the Oracle database is reinstalled or recreated on the new target environment.

This procedure has several advantages: It enables jumps across several database versions and new options can be implemented easily. In addition, all objects can be reorganized or newly created.

The ACS Center of Expertise for SAP in Walldorf is a small, fine team with unique know-how as a link between two worlds.

ACS for Oracle DB in SAP environments

• Analyses and "health checks" of databases and hardware
• Workshops for Oracle and SAP customers to ensure perfect interaction between the products
• Mission Critical Support
• Migrations, upgrades, optimizations and compressions of Oracle databases

Oracle Migration Service for databases

• For Oracle DB, e.g. in the SAP environment
• Migration of huge, complex data volumes in one weekend
• Secure migration from Oracle or third-party hardware or O/S to Oracle platforms such as Exadata
• Simultaneous upgrade of the database to a new version
• Simultaneous compression of up to 70 percent and "cleaning up" of the database for extremely improved performance
• Remote or on-site implementation, with detailed documentation
• Real-time monitoring and reporting for rapid detection and elimination of potential problems
• Protection of customer data through comprehensive security technologies and processes
• Ideal service, e.g. in combination with the purchase of an Exadata, for fast migration.