Skip links

Moving your Oracle database to the cloud? Why not consider Google Cloud?

Author: Published on: Published in: Business Insights

In Data Center IT Engineer Works on Crash Cart Laptop. We See Rows of Server Racks and One Cabinet is Open.

 

Oracle has been the leader in the relational database world for over forty years – but migrations, both on-premises and to the cloud, require more effort to move workloads than many realize.  Often migrations are thought of as simple lift-in-shifts, but when it comes to Oracle, these typically are larger and more complex than expected.  If you are considering migrating to the cloud, you’ll need to consider a lot of factors, such as:

  • What will be the architectural changes?
  • How or what database upgrades are needed; if any?
  • Will there be any consolidation of databases?
  • What licenses are portable?
  • Will there be any migration downtime, for databases and applications?

In answering the questions above, you may still be considering migrating your Oracle database to a cloud platform.  As

part of that decision process, you may be considering migrating or simply replacing your Oracle database for one or more reason:

  • If you have a midsize to large Oracle database servers
  • If you are out-of-date or out-of-support and running on at-risk on-premises hardware
  • If you have over-provisioned on Oracle Hardware (i.e. Oracle engineered systems)
  • If your Oracle foot print is relatively smaller and desire a cheaper platform to run on
  • If you have an Oracle Real-Application Cluster (RAC) or want to simplify your Oracle database footprint by dropping RAC licenses
  • If you are evaluating analytics options such as AI, ML, IoT and any other cloud service(s)
  • If you are looking to simplify your IT environments with a scalable cloud platform using managed database services
  • Looking to integrate new technologies that can drive innovation

Whatever your reasons, you may feel overwhelmed with the thought and the complexity (and expense), of moving your Oracle environment into the cloud. Know that Oracle is not the only option!

Your path forward through Google Cloud

There are three primary migration strategies for Oracle on Google Cloud:

  1. Re-Hosting with Google’s Bare Metal Solution (BMS)
  2. Re-Platform with Google’s Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL or AlloyDB (Public Preview)
  3. Rewrite with Cloud Spanner

Each of these migration strategies offer unique benefits to getting your Oracle database into Google Cloud.

Bare Metal Solution (BMS)

Google’s Bare Metal Solution includes an interconnect to the rest of Google Cloud.  This option provides you the ability to provision bare metal infrastructure using Oracle certified hardware via regional extensions connected to Google Cloud by a managed, high-performance connection and low-latency network.  This means you can lift-n-shift your Oracle workloads into the cloud with minimal risk and change.

Benefits: You can provision infrastructure on Oracle certified hardware, faster migration times due to no application rewrites and maintaining familiarity of your current stack.

Challenges: Larger Oracle database environments could require server sizing and configuration challenges; possibility involving operating system changes and/or database upgrades.

CloudSQL (for PostgreSQL)

PostgreSQL has come on the scene in recently years and provided organizations with a way reduce licensing fees and maintenance costs that are associated with Oracle database while keeping core database capabilities.  If you are looking for a way to reduce costs, Google CloudSQL (for PostgreSQL)  is a cloud-native open source database that fits the objective.  It is a fully managed relational database service that allows you to set up, maintain, manage and administer PostgreSQL relational database within Google Cloud.  With included options for  high-availability, replication, encryption, and automatic storage increases; organizations can re-platform while lowering overall costs.  Organizations can offload analytics-centric works loads to Google BigQuery as needed for data warehousing needs.

Benefits: Through the adoption of open-source technologies, you can reduce your reliance on a single vendor, modernize your database architecture and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Challenges: It can be difficult to completely eliminate vendor lock-in, and it could affect application support down the road.

Cloud Spanner

Need a relational database with global reach and scalability? Consider the cloud-native database Cloud Spanner, which provides a high-availability SLA of 99.999%. It’s an enterprise-grade, globally distributed database service built specifically for the cloud that combines the benefits of a relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scaling

Benefits: You’ll gain horizontal scaling without migration from relational to NoSQL databases, and you’ll be able to focus on application logic instead of spending time managing hardware and software.

Challenges: You’ll most likely need to rewrite or redesign your application architecture to fit with Cloud Spanner’s feature set, and data migration can be tricky. In spite of the challenges, customers see a huge benefit in using Google Cloud services in managing and using data more efficiently for various business use cases.

Migrate with confidence

In today’s ever changing IT world, there are multiple strategies for migration to a cloud.  With RheoData, you will get a detail assessment that will help you understand the complexity of the migration strategy and level of effort required. Enabling you to quickly get a sense of ROI for your migration.

By using RheoData, you will maximize your investment through our experience in migrating some of the most complex environments using a broad range of migration tools.

 

Contact RheoData today to begin the discussion and improve your migration strategy!

 

Related Posts