Database migration with Business Continuity in mind

There are several markets in which the interruption of an IT service is not an option at all. Finance is certainly one of them. The client that engaged Lutech and a suite of database management solutions is one of the undisputed leaders of the sector in Italy, with a base of over 20 million customers.

More specifically, the company in question offers solutions for digital payments and transactions for the biggest national and international banks. In the wake of a deep transformation aimed at digitizing and automating its infrastructure, the company highlighted the need to change its central database in order to adapt it to the demands of real-time app and web portal processes.

The customer needed to migrate the entire database to a new infrastructure with more up-to-date applications and greater processing and storage capacity. The infrastructure supported more than 65 core applications for its operations and customers. Given the size and sensitivity of the project, Lutech opted for a database management solution that would minimize downtime and ensure zero data loss, and therefore business continuity.

The objective, therefore, was to implement a database migration process without service interruptions and without data losses. In addition, increased security and performance were to be achieved. The goal was pursued by packaging a suitable bundle able to align the old infrastructure to the new one in real time, also providing for testing of all applications.

With a database migration for a company providing financial services 24/7, service interruptions and data loss are not an option.

Lutech’s dedicated team therefore created a project with a very complex architecture that was developed over a period of about nine months. The procedure involved migration without intermediate steps, creating, specifically, two database instances – version 9 and version 12 of the Oracle solution already implemented – keeping them perfectly aligned with a dual data synchronization flow, thanks to integration of the tools provided by the Quest Software suite. 

Switching from one Oracle DB version to another would certainly result in a significant improvement in management automation, ease of control and increased overall performance. 

All applications used and dependent on the database were tested for every possible call and released to production without ever interrupting the service, thus guaranteeing the customer complete security and integrity of the migrated data.

Among the tools made available by the Quest Software suite, there are some unique features in the database migration solutions field. In particular, Foglight is a key monitoring tool for the analysis phase. This tool is able to achieve instance monitoring down to one hundredth of a second, along with precise control of migration quality.

The core of the project is represented by Shareplex, the specific database replication tool for migration in Oracle environments. Other modules contained in the Toad solution, such as Benchmark Factory, which performs database load tests in high production environments, and the DB Admin module, which creates and compares database schematics, have proven to be especially effective.

Toad, in particular, ensures the automation of tasks, collaboration and sharing of projects, code and activities between the members of the development team and is able to identify and diagnose database root issues to minimize risks in the release to production.

Another module used by Lutech that has proven to be successful in reorganizing and optimizing database performance is Space Manager alongside LiveReorg.

In conclusion, the project based on Quest Software’s database management solutions and implemented by Lutech kept all the business continuity promises to the customer. In addition to guaranteeing zero data loss and zero downtime, the migration process achieved excellent results in terms of security and database consolidation. The reorganization of the database also allowed all recent compliance requirements to be met, such as the GDPR and other financial sector regulations.