Pythian Blog: Technical Track

Migrating Oracle Workloads to Google Cloud - BMS

by Valerie Parham-Thompson on Dec 9, 2020 12:00:00 AM

In these challenging and ever-changing times, most organizations would welcome the opportunity to reduce overhead, drive innovation and become more agile. While all these benefits are possible with a move to the cloud, many organizations are overwhelmed at the thought of migrating Oracle databases and related software, which are often perceived as a complex and expensive part of a technology estate. It’s true that migrating databases is a uniquely challenging undertaking, however Google Cloud offers infrastructure solutions – including Bare Metal Solution (BMS), and cloud-native databases such as PostgreSQL on Cloud SQL / PostgreSQL on GCE or Cloud Spanner – which enable you to meet the challenge head-on. Combine Google’s offerings with Pythian’s decades of experience working with Oracle, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL and all related technologies, and it’s possible to maximize your results while minimizing migration pain.

Migration Motivators

There are three primary reasons for organizations to either migrate or replace Oracle:
  • Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) – they want to decrease upfront hardware, software and maintenance costs (e.g. licensing).
  • Scalability and availability – apps and systems need reliable and dependable databases that can easily scale to meet demanding business needs.
  • Simplification – they want to reduce the burdens of data center and database management by leveraging managed infrastructure and managed database services.

Migration Options and Strategies

As mentioned above, Google Cloud offers multiple strategies for your specific migration journey when it comes to licensing, maintenance costs and manageability. These include:
  1. Bare Metal Solution (BMS)
  2. PostgreSQL
    1. On Cloud SQL
    2. On GCE (Google Compute Engine)
  3. Cloud Spanner
The focus of this post is BMS.

Google BMS

Google’s BMS service provides customers with a range of new options and capabilities to help move complex parts of their database estate. BMS can let you simply lift and shift your workloads while providing hardware, hardware support and integrated billing and support. When contemplating an Oracle migration to BMS, it’s vital to consider the following items:
  1. Architecture changes
  2. Operating system and chipset changes
  3. Database upgrades
  4. Consolidation
  5. License portability
  6. Migration downtime
You should also consider the following pros and cons of a move to BMS: Benefits:
  • Infrastructure provisioned using Oracle-certified hardware.
  • Increased migration options, allowing for time savings.
  • Reduction or elimination of application rewrites.
  • The familiarity of using an industry-standard stack.
  • Oracle licensing approach which reduces complexities and audit risk.
Challenges:
  • Server sizing and configuration (for example, a huge source Oracle database may require consolidation, re-alignment or re-allocation).
  • Operating system and chipset changes.
  • Possible database upgrades.
For in-depth analysis and insight, download Pythian’s “ Oracle Database on Google Bare Metal Solution ” white paper . And, of course, Pythian is always happy to leverage our expertise to help engineer the optimal cloud migration solution for your business; mitigating the risks of migration while maximizing throughput. Our proven approach to migration lets you move your Oracle workloads with complete confidence. Ready to start a conversation? Email us at googlecloud@pythian.com for more information. Don’t miss our posts which look more in-depth at PostgreSQL on Cloud / PostgreSQL on GCE and Cloud Spanner.
Topics: SQL Server Technical Track

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