BT Deploys Data Integration Technology to Safely Migrate Business Critical System without User Impact, Reduces Downtime by 90%
 
 

BT Deploys Data Integration Technology to Safely Migrate Business Critical System without User Impact, Reduces Downtime by 90%

  • Oracle Customer:  BT Group plc
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Communications
    Employees:  92,600
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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BT Group plc is one of the world’s leading communications solutions and services providers, with operations in 170 countries. It delivers fixed-line, broadband, and mobile services, as well as TV products and networked IT services.

BT developed an application to automate its network inventory planning and service provisioning. This application is crucial to BT’s operations, automating inventory planning for the organization’s next generation internet protocol (IP)-based convergent network infrastructure, known as 21st Century Network (21CN). It is also critical to enabling BT to deliver next-generation services to its customers―from IP-based voice communications, to digital television, music, and internet content, to mobile Ethernet and fast broadband.

BT’s network inventory planning and service provisioning application, which handles 40,000 transactions per minute, is key to providing end-to-end services to customers. It stores the entire organization’s network inventory information, such as circuits, routers, switches, and locations, it and is a single source of truth for other interfacing components, such as network event monitoring systems, business intelligence systems, and data warehouses. As this application is so crucial to BT’s customer delivery, any system outages could severely impact BT’s service delivery and troubleshooting capabilities. Therefore, it was difficult for BT to find suitable time slots for planned maintenance, and it often delayed lengthy activities, such as platform refreshes.

BT had a key business requirement to migrate the network inventory planning and service provisioning application from the HP-Tru64 operating system to Oracle Linux with minimal downtime. Previously, the system would have been down for 20 hours to complete this migration. Instead, BT chose Oracle GoldenGate to ensure a smooth migration, which it completed within less than two hours. Since the migration, BT has used Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edtion within the new architecture to significantly improve the system’s overall performance.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from BT Group plc

  • “This was our first implementation using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition, and it is regarded internally as a highly successful project. We significantly reduced our total cost of migration and exceeded our internal customers’ requirements for system availability.” – Dhananjay Papde, Principal Consultant, BT

  • Optimize investment in Oracle enterprisewide license agreement (ELA) by implementing a policy of “Oracle First” for all internal software to drive consumption of Oracle products and services throughout the organization
  • Achieve planned system migrations with near-zero downtime and minimal business disruption to eliminate adverse impact on the company’s delivery of high speed and next generation telecommunications services to businesses and consumers
  • Reduce maintenance support costs
  • Automate, standardize, and streamline network capacity to eliminate reliance on manual data sourcing, rekeying, and manual data analysis
  • Collate and analyze platform utilization data to improve decision-making by using a fast, efficient, and consistent method across all platforms
  • Ensure all systems are fully up-to-date to eliminate risk of nonsupported systems, such as the end-of-life HP Tru64 operating system and the HP Alpha server

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with BT and Oracle Partner Tech Mahindra to deploy Oracle GoldenGate to complete the migration of BT’s network inventory planning and service provisioning application from the HP-Tru64 operating system to Oracle Linux, completing phase 1 in less than two hours
  • Reduced risk of system unavailability during migration, as setup, data extraction, and replication was done in the background with Oracle GoldenGate to maintain system availability for 40,000 transactions per minute and 2,000 concurrent sessions during the migration
  • Avoided more than 20 hours of estimated system downtime, if the migration had been completed using a textbook model of backup, copy, and restore without the help of Oracle GoldenGate
  • Ensured that disaster recovery capabilities remained in place throughout the migration
  • Avoided a potential 20 hours to restore the system if migrating using the textbook solution, enabling BT to roll back in less than 30 minutes, if necessary
  • Tested the rollback strategy prior to migration, significantly reducing the possible financial impact from potential disruption of telecommunications services if the network inventory system were unavailable for 20 hours
  • Improved performance of the network inventory planning and service provisioning system by more than 15%―with multiple data stores created in the new architecture for two network event monitoring systems that need to be available 24/7―to ensure that customer provision of next generation telecommunications services are always available
  • Improved data handling speed by more than 20% with Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition, and significantly reduced the time required to execute business processes compared to previous manual, error-prone processes involved in network capacity management
  • Used Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition to provide a common method of data extraction and consolidation to enable efficient, accurate reporting on capacity thresholds for network utilization
  • Reduced load on the network inventory planning system by more than 10%, using Oracle GoldenGate to take near real-time feeds from it into a data warehouse
  • Ensured that the network inventory planning application is fully supported with an up-to-date operating system, Oracle Linux, eliminating the risk of a business critical application being out of support
  • Increased ability to exploit the Oracle First strategy—which aims to maximize use of an ELA—by migrating to Oracle Linux with Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition

Why Oracle

“We considered other options such as Oracle Streams, Oracle Logical Standby Database, and QUEST Shareplex,” said Vipul Patel, platform designer, BT. “After a detailed analysis, we concluded that using Oracle GoldenGate to smoothly migrate to a new environment with minimal outage on the production system was the best option available. We completed the migration in less than two hours.”

Partner

  • Oracle Partner
    Tech Mahindra

 

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