Moving from On-Site to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
When one hears the word “Hawaii,” there are several things that come to mind.
- Vacations
- Beautiful beaches
- Surfing
- Pineapple
- Hawaiian shirts
No doubt you could add many additional items to your “My Favorite Things About Hawaii” list. Now here’s a question for you – did you include Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, PeopleSoft Managed Services, or downsizing and/or eliminating your on-premises server to your list of favorites?
If not, we understand. Hawaii and OCI aren’t typically used in the same sentence. But to the CIO and network admin team at Brigham Young University–Hawaii, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has provided significant benefits for this small but thriving private university on Oahu’s North Shore.
Before partnering with Gideon Taylor, BYU–Hawaii were charged with reducing the size of their data center due to the high costs of on-site maintenance. Cooling a data center in Hawaii is not cheap! It was also difficult and expensive to recruit and retain staff with the required PeopleSoft experience. For these and other reasons, BYU–Hawaii wanted to move to the Cloud, but didn’t know a lot about how to do so. This is where Gideon Taylor stepped in to assist.
We offer a service called GT PureRed Hosting, where we will host your full stack PeopleSoft environment using Oracle Cloud infrastructure that’s available in over 40 regions around the world. We take care of all maintenance, patching, day-to-day operations, and much more. We keep clients current with everything and even offer our own monitoring solutions. How do we do all of this? In a word, automation. We’ve taken the time to build, develop and evolve our own automation tooling, using industry best practices so that we can get this done efficiently. Automation enables us to take on more clients whereas a small organization like BYU–Hawaii faces challenges in keeping up with maintenance and constant equipment upgrades. We understand that’s not always easy, especially as Oracle regularly updates and optimizes their processes. Gideon Taylor maintains our own PeopleSoft architecture which allows us to increase the performance of your system just by moving it over to OCI. Additionally, we manage all the security certifications and other requirements needed to properly run your system in the Cloud.
The Power of GT PureRed Hosting
So, how did all this help BYU–Hawaii? Gideon Taylor moved their PeopleSoft databases to OCI, including all upgrades, and we now provide them with robust suite of managed services. But here’s the best part. All of this happened with just a 30-minute cut over and with no loss of data. 30 minutes! They had a Recovery Time Objective of 12 hours to recover if there was ever an issue. Our tests consistently show a four-hour RTO to provide a full-system recovery including everything from the database, all servers, etc. Although some businesses might be fine with four hours, with the stability of OCI we can get BYU–Hawaii down to a 15-minute RTO. Remarkable! During the cut over their CIO was able to monitor everything in real time and was so excited by how smoothly everything went in the transition. Remarkably, even though BYU–Hawaii’s system is now hosted on the mainland, it provides a faster response time than when they were running their own data center because of the combined power of OCI tooling and Gideon Taylor’s proprietary architecture.
GT PureRed includes the following offerings:
☑️ Full stack PeopleSoft hosting at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
☑️ Migrate your existing PeopleSoft system to OCI
☑️ Optional GT PureRed architecture to get even more performance for your users
☑️ Multiple connectivity methods are available to ensure your PeopleSoft solution is secure
☑️ GT leverages automation tooling such as ansible, terraform and puppet to ensure all managed environments are highly efficient
☑️ GT proprietary monitoring solution keeps an eye on your PeopleSoft environment
☑️ GT keeps your PeopleSoft systems up to date with our KeepCurrent offering
☑️ GT applies CPUs, PUMs and Tools updates on an agreed upon schedule
☑️ GT also provides general OCI Architecture consulting and migration assistance if you aren’t ready for us to take over the management of your PeopleSoft systems
Oftentimes when someone talks about moving to the Cloud there are understandable concerns about cost, downtime, complexity, risk, etc. We get that. Another benefit of working with Gideon Taylor is our ability to handle your mundane PS tasks like patching, PUM updates, and more with our “Keep Current” service if you’re not quite ready to move to the Cloud but still want some of the benefits found in OCI.
The next step is a simple one. Let’s talk. Just give us a call (801-434-7260) or schedule a personalized demo with one of our OCI experts and we’ll look at whether collaborating with Gideon Taylor is the right step for you. Aloha!
