Introduction
A Fortune 500 Tier I American pharmaceutical company specializing in oncology product development and innovative medicines recently chose ESDS’ Cloud-based DR Solution. The pharmaceutical research corporation’s source environment was setup with enterprise grade software and hardware. The aim was to set up a DR site on cloud and overcome the shortfall of technical capabilities in the company.
The company ran all its mission-critical applications in their Primary and Secondary DC set up at two different locations. Oracle Data Guard helped protect the Oracle Database with help of replication. The aim was to bring out the best in-class DR environment for its mission critical pharmaceutical business operations with minimal switchover time and near zero data loss.
Challenge
In spite of all the state-of-art technological installation, pharmaceutical operations were being critically hit by real-time challenges of establishing business continuity of Tier 1 PeopleSoft based HR and Finance Web Applications in the Cloud. As the secondary DC site is not in Cloud and is neither owned nor operated by the client, the company was facing multiple challenges in managing its DR infrastructure, platform and application services. In the event of Switchover, start and reconfiguration time for Virtual Machines was leading to higher RTO. RPO as high as 12 to 16 hours was being recorded due to twice-a-day replication schedule for application, web and file servers.
The Solution
The list of services provided to the Embassy group are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Operating System and Database Management, Backup Services, network connectivity, tremendous 24/7 support from ESDS’ team, replication configuration management, complete monitoring, robust Security and optimum cost effectiveness in terms of reducing OPEX.
Having chosen Oracle Cloud as an Infrastructure Partner for databases and applications, the pharma corporation’s main hiccup was practically migrating to a cloud-based solution. The authorities were skeptical about internal technical maturity.
With the necessary skill sets, experience in architecting, installing and managing cloud infrastructure, ESDS managed to overcome a variety of challenges including supply chain integration, on premise application-to-application integration and effectively using Oracle’s cloud-based services for data quality, data persistence and overall business performance. Choice of Oracle DataGuard was retained for Database async replication which reduced RPO for database to less than 10 mins and RTO under 2 hours.
From TCO perspective; instead of $600k investment in the DR hardware and $300k per year cost of management and DC space, the whole project turned into OPEX cost of just $300k per year.
With expertise in Oracle Public Cloud Administration, Database and DataGuard technology, ESDS helped Oracle and the pharmaceutical company prepare a realistic project plan. The company achieved success in the form of agility and support for rapid business innovation, as versatile skill sets of ESDS & Oracle in domains such as Cloud Compute, Network, Database and Storage helped in successful DR implementation.
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