MercuryGate provides powerful transportation management solutions (TMS) proven to be a competitive advantage for today’s most successful shippers, 3PLs, freight forwarders, brokers, and carriers. Their TMS is executed in a fully autonomous solution that is even capable of automatically adapting to disruptions as they occur.
Challenge
MercuryGate recognized their existing on-premises database environment didn’t scale easily. They were also concerned with environment sprawl due to an excessive number of VMware virtual machines running database instances on-premises; fast growth of the customer base resulted in the growing number of VMs becoming an administrative burden. Because of this, MercuryGate was looking to consolidate their databases to a smaller number of larger VMs for easier scalability and manageability.
With the help of their partner SHI, they looked to migrate their on-premises environment to AWS to achieve the scalability they desired and decided to use FlashGrid Cluster with Oracle RAC to achieve database high availability. Thanks to FlashGrid Launcher and fully automated Infrastructure-as-Code deployment, MercuryGate was able to use self-serve mode and provision their first cluster on AWS in just a few hours.
Key Challenges
- Scalability of database infrastructure to keep up with business growth
- Consolidation of hundreds of DBs running on separate VMware VMs to a small number of clusters on AWS
- Retaining high availability of heavy transaction processing (OLTP) databases
Key Success Factors
- Migration of Oracle databases to AWS
- FlashGrid Cluster with Oracle RAC for high availability
- Fast and easy automated deployment with FlashGrid Launcher
Solution: FlashGrid Cluster for Oracle on AWS
An Engineered Cloud System designed for database high availability; FlashGrid Cluster runs mission critical Oracle databases on AWS. With three RAC database nodes spread across three availability zones, the database backend can withstand even major outages affecting an entire data center. This maximizes the uptime of the applications and minimizes the risks associated with having to engage a disaster recovery plan in case of a cloud infrastructure outage.
With performance optimized for the most demanding workloads, MercuryGate was able to right-size from the start and resize as needed with no downtime. And as MercuryGate discovered, FlashGrid Launcher let them create an Oracle RAC cluster in their AWS account with just a few mouse clicks. The entire cluster configuration process is fully automated and repeatable, saving time and costly configuration mistakes.
“The deep database knowledge of the FlashGrid team is impressive. With their help we were able to achieve our goals of migrating to AWS and scaling our database backend to keep pace with the growth of our business.”
Adam Jones – Vice President, Technology Infrastructure and Operations
Conclusion
Using FlashGrid Cluster for Oracle RAC, MercuryGate has deployed the first batch of Oracle RAC clusters and started migration and consolidation of their databases on AWS. Now MercuryGate has a solid foundation for scaling and managing their database backend aligned with the rapid growth of their transportation management SaaS business.
SHI International Corp. is a transformational technology solutions provider serving the needs of more than 15,000 corporate, enterprise, public sector and academic customer organizations around the world. It helps companies achieve business goals through the use of technologies ranging from software licensing and end user computing devices to innovative cloud and edge solutions. With over 5,000 employees worldwide, SHI is the largest Minority and Woman Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) in the U.S.
