Vendor management systems provider Beeline saves $1 million annually by consolidating infrastructure to Oracle Cloud

• Unify merged solutions with another vendor management system provider, while ensuring compliance
• Reduce their costs and allow them to reduce the number of data centers they maintain
• Improve performance

• Saving $1 million annually on infrastructure costs
• Simplifies keeping hardware and software up to date, and compliance
• Direct contact with Oracle product teams and the ability to influence the product
• Mission-critical infrastructure for Beeline's IQNavigator SaaS product
• Met compliance needs

 

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Unifying merged solutions while ensuring compliance

At the end of 2016, Beeline merged with another vendor management system provider, IQNavigator. As a result, the team is updating and modernizing the joint production and disaster recovery (DR) deployments of their core offerings. After finishing a data center consolidation project in Europe, the company also decided to pursue the same goal in North America.

After exploring the possibility of refreshing their on-premises hardware, Beeline concluded that moving their DR and ancillary services to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would reduce their costs and allow them to reduce the number of data centers they maintain.

Consolidating from four data centers down to two

The project to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has helped Beeline improve performance, consolidate data centers, address compliance, and control costs.

Beeline is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute bare metal instances, Exadata, Block Volumes and Object Storage, as well as 10 Gbps FastConnect to provide secure, predictable connectivity between Beeline's remaining datacenters and Oracle. Beeline also uses Oracle Management Cloud for monitoring, Java Cloud Service, and the Oracle Database Backup Service.

“Legacy applications love IOPS, and we were happy to discover that Oracle's bare metal compute instances could take us from hundreds of thousands of IOPS to millions of IOPS. Our workload can be spiky - people start new roles, wrap up projects, and get paid at the beginning or end of the week - so it's important for us to build on hardware that lets us scale-up under the load.“ said Jason Creson, VP of Infrastructure at Beeline.

Beeline's IQNavigator solution will run in one region, while the DR deployment runs in another, both using Oracle Exadata to help maximize availability. Beeline is currently migrating our DR, development, QA, monitoring, and other environments onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which is enabling them to consolidate four data centers down to two in the near term. They intend to reduce their footprint to one on-premises datacenter in 2019 by moving customer facing environments to OCI.

Beeline had also been exploring containers. The company had produced their own custom Kubernetes environment, but is standardizing and consolidating on Oracle's open-standards based approach as part of the deployment.

While designing and migrating applications, Beeline, and their partner Viscosity, are taking the opportunity to update applications like Oracle E-Business Suite to the latest versions.

“Compliance is an important goal for Beeline,“ said Jason. “We need to be sure all the components of our solution are up to date to best serve our customers, and that's easier to achieve with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.“

Beeline's DR architecture uses a small footprint to help control costs while maintaining the benefits of data replication, and scaling up on demand in the event a disaster necessitates failing over the production workload.

“Oracle's universal credit program is fantastic, and more flexible than other cloud providers. We've already taken advantage of the ability to make changes to our design that we discovered we needed during deployment. It doesn't matter whether we use more network, less storage, or change VM sizes - the universal credits apply, and make it simple,“ said Jason.

• Consolidated four data centers down to two
• Provided secure, predictable connectivity with Oracle Cloud Platform bare metal instances, Exadata, Block Volumes, Object Storage, and 10 Gbps FastConnect
• Heavy workloads from hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS
• Small footprint helps control costs while maintaining the benefits of data replication, and scaling up on demand in the event of a disaster
• Flexible universal credit program allows Beeline to make changes to the design during deployment and simplify management