Platform Migration for One of the Largest Textile and Sports Equipment Manufacturers

Platform Migration for One of the Largest Textile and
Sports Equipment Manufacturers

CONTEXT

Company AAA is one of the world’s most recognized clothing brands. A brand with more than 200 years of experience and a long history of manufacturing quality textiles, it is one of the largest manufacturers and marketers of sports equipment.

AAA sought to upgrade and migrate their Oracle solution – Oracle ATP/ASCP/APCC (OBIEEE-based Product) from AIX 5.2 servers (which is what they were running at the time) to version 12.2.8 on Linux Servers.

PROBLEM and SOLUTION

As AAA planned to migrate their Oracle infrastructure, they sought a solution that was operationally cost effective and drove overall improvement in their existing processes with more modern technology and a better customer experience. They also wanted to utilize new features that could make the Oracle solution more effective and efficient.

To support this customer, RTS created the following objectives:

  • Upgrade E-Business from 12.1.3 to 12.2.8
  • Upgrade the database from 11.2.0.4.7 to 12.1.0.2
  • Upgrade OBIEE from 11.1.1.7 to 11.1.1.9 for APCC
  • Change platform from AIX to Oracle Linux
  • Ensure EBS (12.1.3) integrations continued to work as required
  • Maintain high efficiency and performance throughput in scheduling orders with application and database upgrades as depicted in Figure below

APPROACH

Below is the approach RTS followed to achieve the business objective:

RTS Approach

PROCESS OVERVIEW

PROCESS OVERVIEW

3-Phase Live Production Plan

Phase Live Production Plan

In the first phase of the production, RTS migrated the database from the AIX platform to the Linux platform. During this migration, we used the transportable tablespace method as the endian formats are different between two platforms. Additionally, we also considered a logical migration method, but since the database size is large (near 2 TB), it failed with dependency issues.

Once the database was migrated, we upgraded the database to 12c, as the 12.1.3 application is certified with the 12c database. After the upgrade, we proceeded with a complete round of testing—both technical and functional. This helped to rule out any database-related issues because some initialization parameters were changed in 12c, and the platform migrated at the same time.

Next, we moved to the final phase of the project, which included upgrading the application from 12.1.3 to 12.2.8. We also completed the following:

  • Upgraded the connected application, like APCC, from OBIEE 11.1.7 to 11.1.9
  • Performed three trials for the application upgrade and, with each cycle, optimized it
  • Optimized the application cycle by 60% by purging and configuring database and OS level parameters

RESULTS

RTS helped the customer achieve the following outcomes:

  • Renewed hardware support for aging hardware with a cost-effective model
  • Provided Oracle Linux support (single vendor – Oracle and Oracle Products)
  • Improved performance in batch jobs by 65% and improved reports by 40%
  • Created new functionality for the supply chain with clear and improved reporting and integration via OBIEE