Rumo runs Brazilian railroad operations on Oracle Cloud

One of the main railway companies in Latin America, Rumo Logística runs almost 14,000 kilometers of rail lines in Brazil, connecting the three main industrial regions with the country’s three main ports. The company transports 26% of all grains exported from the country, and about 30% of the world’s sugar.

To keep this operation running, the company relied on two data centers: an outsourced data center in Piracicaba, Brazil, and another located at its headquarters in Curitiba, Brazil. But the railway operation control center ran entirely at the Curitiba data center, so there was no backup in case of a natural disaster or other major problems, says Yugo Nomura, IT head at Rumo Logística.

The company decided to move its data to cloud-based infrastructure. However, this decision brought on a second challenge. The company operates 24/7, so there’s no room for downtime, even for a data center migration. Any migration had to be carried out in a very short time.

Rumo Logística chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to meet these needs. The leadership picked OCI because Oracle understood the company’s processes and operations, embraced the challenge of carrying out the migration in a very short timeframe, and provided all the technology needed for the migration and ongoing operations.

Another important reason for choosing OCI is that Rumo has a VMware framework. OCI is set up to run VMware architecture, so this streamlined the migration. Oracle also presented Rumo with a solution in which the company could retain its entire IP structure, thus saving the company from any network and routing-related problems during the migration.

Rumo successfully migrated to OCI in three months, with the entire data center operation now running in the cloud. The company’s leaders believe that Rumo was the first railroad in Brazil to operate 100% in the cloud, from administrative to operational systems. The move to the cloud includes systems that Rumo had previously tried to migrate to other on-premises data centers without success. “It was the first time we were able to take, for example, our train licensing system to operate outside of the Curitiba headquarters and directly in the cloud,” says Yugo Nomura, head of IT. All the systems for train control and circulation operate on OCI.

“It’s in this system that I have 400 trains running simultaneously on our rails every day, all the time, where each one needs to circulate without any interference or risk of collision with the other trains circulating in that region,” Nomura says.

Important systems for the company are integrated within the OCI platform, including solutions for railway management, supplies, billing, human resources, and speed restrictions. As a result, the operation went from being centralized in a physical space to existing in the digital space. Rumo also says it gets important financial benefits from the cloud migration.