Jeroen Gouma, Technical Consultant at AMIS, gave an in-depth presentation for nlOUG on the migration of essential systems to Oracle Cloud at Juva. Together with Edwin van Meerendonk, Solution Architect at Juva, he explains the steps taken, the challenges encountered and the significant benefits the project ultimately delivered.

Juva is an energy network company serving 60,000 connected businesses. It supports developments in the changing energy landscape and plays an active role in providing services for decentralised initiatives within regulated and private networks. The company closely monitors changing markets and responds to the energy transition and the drive towards sustainability. Originally focused on the Westland and Midden Delfland regions, Juva is increasingly expanding beyond these areas. It actively engages with all stakeholders to develop the best solutions together. Its primary activity is ensuring a safe, reliable and affordable energy supply, both now and in the future.

In total, 46 applications and 15 databases were migrated from an on-premises environment to Oracle Cloud. “We started by assessing the status of the various systems,” says Jeroen Gouma, Oracle Cloud specialist at AMIS Conclusion. “We focused on consolidating the systems onto a single version of Oracle Database so that migration to Oracle Cloud could follow a consistent approach. We also mapped the interfaces and made changes wherever features were being used that are not recommended in Oracle Cloud. Extensive test plans and test scripts were developed to verify that the systems would continue to function in the same way after migration. We began by migrating the less critical systems to build confidence in the methodology and its results.” Particular attention was given to migrating the core systems, containing 7 terabytes of data, with minimal downtime. Differences between the development, testing, acceptance and production environments were also reduced, making it easier to promote changes between environments. Finally, a backup strategy was implemented that allows these systems to write backups to cloud storage, delivering additional cost savings.

Following extensive testing, the systems and their data were migrated to Oracle Cloud over a weekend to minimise the impact on existing processes and staff. It was essential to transfer all historical data and the latest transactions seamlessly. Several systems were also standardised on the same version so they could be combined. Ultimately, the 15 databases were consolidated into 8 databases in the cloud. Ronald Van Wuijtswinkel: “This move enables Juva to avoid significant future investments, such as purchasing hardware and using a data centre, while getting more value from our software licensing budget.” “The availability of our environments has improved, and operating costs are lower. Over a five-year period, our total costs are 27% lower, including the migration costs.” “An additional benefit is that the systems now require less administration, and the new environment has a smaller environmental footprint. ”Following the migration, AMIS manages the databases in Oracle Cloud.

Migrating Oracle databases to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can deliver significant cost savings while improving the availability and security of your systems. Our standardised methodology ensures a smooth migration of large databases with predictable results. Would you like to know more about this approach? Feel free to contact Gerard van den Broek or Ise Douwes.