Optimizing global logistics
A leading supply chain technology provider delivers solutions that enable carriers, logistics firms, and asset owners in over 130 countries to make their processes more agile, reliable and sustainable. The organization boasts an extensive network and combines direct connectivity to carriers with nearly 30 years of industry data. As a result, it helps clients maximize the impact of transportation spend, improve customer service and reduce carbon emissions.
The company serves the entire logistics industry, from small players right up to global giants. International supply chains have become increasingly complex, fragmented and time-sensitive. Shipments typically pass through multiple touchpoints, partners, and transportation modes. These multiple redundant options translate into great resilience; if one link in the chain is unavailable, shipments can easily be rerouted through another. However, multiple links also render it nearly impossible to maintain end-to-end visibility. And without visibility, it’s virtually impossible to optimize logistics processes.
This organization offers an open, neutral, real-time information platform for all trading partners to drive asset optimization, end-to-end traceability — and the all-important visibility. An Assistant Vice President (AVP) at the company shares, “We’re the digital glue in the supply chain, giving all partners the visibility they need. To increase the scalability and resilience of one of our three key SaaS applications, we decided to move it to the cloud. This required us to find a fast, reliable and accurate way to move the large existing multi-tenant database to Google Cloud Platform.”
Fast and reliable data migration
The company’s SaaS application empowers logistics companies and their employees to replace paper-based, manual processes for accepting and assigning loads, creating invoices and receiving payments. To make this logistics execution solution cloud-based, the team faced the challenge of migrating a 1TB on-premises instance of Oracle Database. “Given the large amount of data, the criticality of the application, and the fact that we had different database technologies on each side, manual migration was not a viable option,” says the AVP. “We wanted a robust, commercially developed and supported data streaming solution that was proven in the marketplace and that would ensure error-free migration. Striim fits the bill perfectly.” Rather than requiring a lift-and-shift operation on a shut-down database, Striim Migration Service for Google Cloud enabled the organization to set up continuous unidirectional streaming from its on-premises Oracle Database to a MySQL target running on a Google Compute Engine VM. This allowed the company to manage the migration without downtime for the existing on-premises database and applications, with the ability to optimize and test the new cloud-based environment before switching over. “Performance was one of our key requirements, as was data integrity,” according to the AVP.
Country:
United States
Industry:
Logistics and Supply Chain Technology
Challenge:
This organization needed to migrate one of its most popular solutions to the cloud to increase scalability and resilience. However, it needed to ensure an accurate, timely, low-risk migration of its business-critical database.
Solution:
The company selected Striim for Google Cloud to provide live streaming of data from an on-premises Oracle source to a MySQL target on Google Cloud, minimizing disruption and risk.
Benefits:
Using Striim meant there was no need to stop its production database, so the team was able to complete its migration quickly and accurately, without significant downtime or disruption for its tens of thousands of global users.
Robust, accurate, low-risk solution
Following an initial bulk load of data, the organization set up Striim to replicate live data to the cloud instance of MySQL, to keep it aligned with the on-premises Oracle production database. “For various internal reasons, we needed to stop and start the migration project, and Striim provided flexible licensing to minimize our costs,” shares the team member. “We have a relatively small IT team and budget, so that was extremely helpful.”
Now that the migration is complete, the organization is working to decommission and retire the source data center, which will produce significant long-term cost-savings. “Beyond reduced costs, the cloud migration enabled by Striim gives us access to all the other benefits of Google Cloud Platform. Compared with adding an on-premises instance of Oracle, it’s incredibly fast and simple to provision a new MySQL environment, or to scale up the existing platform by adding more virtual resources,” shares a team member.
The ability to keep the production database running throughout the migration significantly reduced the risk of disruption for the business and its clients. “The user base for our SaaS application is truly global and spread across practically every time zone, and it would not have been practical to find a window of downtime for offline migration,” says the SVP. “With Striim, we got high performance and full data integrity in a robust, easy-to-use solution.” The business’s Chief Information Officer & Head of Customer Success adds, “The complexity and sensitivity of global supply chains have never been more apparent. With assistance from partners such as Striim, our team is able to deliver seamless visibility of global freight movements, helping our clients to keep the world in motion.” Taking the next step with Striim’s enterprise-grade, streaming integration with intelligence platform makes it easy to build continuous, streaming data pipelines—including change data capture (CDC)—to power real-time cloud integration, log correlation, edge processing, and streaming analytics. To find out more about how we could help your organization, visit striim.com.
