Oracle and Diamond Partner Deloitte Consulting LLP Jointly Validate Enterprise Workload Migration to the Cloud with ATADATA
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a true enterprise cloud, with the consistent high performance and predictable low pricing that enterprises require to consider moving their most critical workloads to cloud. We are seeing many enterprise customers leverage the advantages of Oracle Cloud to fuel innovation in their businesses, build environments more securely, avoid the cost and risk of refresh, and realize significant cost savings. This has led to significant interest in automated workload migration to accelerate the move to Oracle Cloud. Customers frequently look for their System Integrator (SI) partners to facilitate the migration of key workloads and reduce risk through proven experience, streamlined operations, and automated capabilities.
Oracle applications play a central role in complex enterprise workflows. Varied infrastructure types and inherent application complexity make it challenging to move applications and associated points of integration to the cloud without unintended disruption to functionality. Effective cloud migration requires investigation, data collection, compatibility assessment, financial measurement, and lockstep coordination between the target cloud platform and migration partners to ensure a smooth and efficient transition. With Deloitte ATADATA, the effort and risk of moving critical workloads from traditional environments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is dramatically reduced through all phases of migration, from discovery and planning all the way to the physical migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and validation after completion. We're proud of this partnership as a key enabler to realizing cloud benefits without being overwhelmed by a migration process that is cost-prohibitive and risky.
In July 2018, Oracle started a joint validation initiative with Deloitte ATADATA for automated cloud migration. For the evaluation, use cases were designed to validate ATAVision discovery and ATAMotion migration modules across four (4) phases that are typical when migrating an application to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:
Discovery of a source environment across all infrastructure elements
Provisioning of compute instances, storage, and network connections in the target Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment
Migration of VMs and data from the source to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Validation of migrated data and application configurations
ATAVision Discovery Overview
Although most organizations possess basic inventory and utilization data, the level of detail and accuracy is often not sufficient to address the needs of a successful migration project. The ATAVision module collects all the data required to develop a comprehensive migration plan including, but not limited to, infrastructure details, affinity relationships, compatibility issues, and software dependencies. The discovery software is agentless, i.e. no installation or reboots are required on the source candidate servers, and the discovery process doesn’t impact system performance. By combining these elements, ATAVision’s automated move group engine creates a detailed migration plan based on a full view of the environment.
ATADATA software can be installed anywhere, provided it has access to the source environment. ATAVision can collect data on physical servers, on-premises VM servers, VMware clusters, or across any hypervisor or competitive cloud platform.
ATAMotion Migration Overview
A significant benefit of Deloitte ATADATA products is their automated integration capability. The ATAVision module combines dependent servers into migration units called move groups. Move groups are imported into an integrated migration module, ATAMotion, and can be migrated independently or combined into a larger orchestrated migration wave plan. Consequently, servers with a high affinity relationship are moved together without omitting critical pieces of a complex application architecture.
The ATAMotion migration technology orchestrates provisioning through integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs. When a migration job is created, all volumes can either be migrated as a set, or specific volumes can be selected for migration. Although ATAMotion can use all available bandwidth, throttling is supported to minimize disruption to production workloads.
Once migration is initiated, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs are leveraged to provision cloud resources. After the target is up and running, the agentless ATAMotion software is deployed at the target. The target then communicates back to the source server to enable data transfer over a secure connection (using either secure cypher key encoding or AES encryption). The direct connectivity between source and target is the key to migrating data and workloads at scale.
Final Thoughts
The Oracle team finds ATADATA tools to be easy to use and effective. By deeply integrating with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs, ATADATA has differentiated their offering from the competition and enabled customers to accomplish comprehensive migrations quickly and successfully. Specifically, the team has noted innovative approaches to automatic provisioning of cloud compute instances based on configuration schemas and seamless migration of VMware servers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Based on our evaluation, ATADATA’s capabilities and integration with Oracle Cloud APIs are “best in class” for migrating enterprise applications smoothly and effectively.
For additional questions, please contact Donald Schmidt Jr., Managing Director Deloitte Consulting, at doschmidt@deloitte.com.
Co-authored by: Donald Schmidt Jr., Managing Director Deloitte Consulting LLP; Manoj Mehta, Director of Product Management, OCI Development and Andrew Reichman, Sr. Director, OCI Development