Multinational oil and gas company migrates legacy JD Edwards to Azure

Synopsis

Challenge

Facing a data center exit as part of its broader cloud strategy and cost reduction initiatives, a multinational oil and gas company looked to migrate mission-critical J.D. Edwards-based IBM i (AS/400) workloads to the cloud.

Results

By working with Skytap, the company successfully migrated business-critical J.D. Edwards applications to Azure, eliminating data center costs while gaining cloud scalability.

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This multinational oil and gas company has operations in exploration and extraction, refining, distribution, power generation and renewable energy.

The Company’s Challenge

A multinational oil and gas company had adopted a cloud-first strategy to streamline operations, reduce costs and modernize application development and deployment. As part of this company-wide digital transformation effort, it had already moved a significant portion of its IT resources to Microsoft Azure over the course of several years. Its goal in doing so was to eliminate data center management overhead across its international data centers. 

The company was now interested in a migration path for its legacy J.D. Edwards-based applications currently running on IBM Power hardware (IBM i, AS/400) on-premises. Because these applications were business-critical and supported 5,000 users across 18 countries, the corporation sought a simple, low-risk path to Azure with little to no business disruption. It also wanted to keep re-architecting to a minimum given its long-term application roadmap and the solution needed to maintain an RPO of under 30 minutes and comply with SOX and PII regulations.

Solution and Outcomes

The company selected Skytap on Azure to migrate its legacy J.D. Edwards-based applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud. This effort would accelerate its migration path for business-critical IBM Power workloads with minimal change and risk while allowing them to benefit from the global availability and scalability of Azure.

The company began work by migrating several of its J.D. Edwards instances to Skytap on Azure with high availability and disaster recovery.

Given the initial success of these migrations, the company has since expanded its use of Skytap on Azure and is now running production, high availability, disaster recovery and dev and test IBM i workloads in Skytap on Azure. 

With Skytap on Azure, the company now has:

  • Three production LPARs with over 15TB of data across multiple Azure availability zones
  • High availability for each production instance to another Azure region
  • Rocket iCloud used for Journal replication between Production and Disaster Recovery
  • Inter-Azure region connectivity via Azure ExpressRoute
  • Daily, monthly, quarterly and annual backups executed using Skytap templates that are then migrated to other Azure regions using Skytap’s copy-to-region capability

The company now has a scalable, on-demand processing and storage via Skytap on Azure and relies on it to move billions of dollars in oil and gas orders globally. As a result of its successful migration, it could close its data centers and decommissioned its on-premise IBM Power hardware, saving millions of dollars annually.

Learn more about how Skytap on Azure can support your organization’s IBM Power migration efforts.

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