Global organizations across industries including Ahold Delhaize, Hitachi Construction Machinery, Lemtrans, and Mazda Motors Logistics Europe N.V. use Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to exit their on-premises data centers and migrate their business-critical applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
To continue to add new capabilities to this service, Oracle released a new OCI Compute shape with an NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPU and an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8358 Processor for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and plans to release another shape based on the AMD EPYC™ 9J14 processor. This will provide customers with additional compute options and improved performance across a wide range of workloads.
“Many organizations that want to move their VMware estates to the cloud are often daunted by the heavy lift and prospect of needing to learn an entirely new set of IT skills,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle Cloud VMware Solution enables organizations to maintain full control of their VMware Clusters and preserve their tools, skills, and processes, eliminating reskilling requirements. For customers, it is a low-risk approach to modernize in the cloud by maintaining an identical operational model to their on-premises VMware Clusters.”
Ahold Delhaize Accelerates Cloud Migration to Keep Pace with Retail Growth
Ahold Delhaize is one of the largest food retailers in the world, with 16 regional brands, 7,700 stores, and more than 400,000 employees. Ahold Delhaize has been operating its on-premises VMware environment for many years, alongside other diverse IT systems and solutions to support its operations.
After running Oracle and non-Oracle applications for critical business processes on VMware, it decided to accelerate the migration to the cloud to increase performance and help cut costs. Starting with its key local brands in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall, Ahold Delhaize leveraged Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to migrate over 400 VMware virtual machines (VMs) supporting its e-commerce, supply chain, and retail processes, to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
This allowed Ahold Delhaize to reduce its remaining data center footprint to zero while maintaining full administrative control over its VMware environment. The roll-out was managed and implemented by the AH Tech Team and Oracle partner DXC Technology, a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork.
“After a review process, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution was the choice for us,” said Gerhard van der Bijl, chief technical officer, Ahold Delhaize Europe & Indonesia. “It allowed us to extend our data center VMware environment into the cloud and leverage our existing processes and expertise, while delivering on our data center exit strategy. One of the most important reasons for us to choose Oracle is that we could lift and shift our workloads without having to make impactful changes to the underlying infrastructure, which allowed our business to continue to operate while we migrated workloads overnight.”
Hitachi Construction Machinery Accelerates Digital Transformation
Hitachi Construction Machinery develops, manufactures, sells, rents, and services hydraulic excavators, wheel loaders, road equipment, and mining equipment, with more than 400,000 units of construction equipment in operation worldwide. To drive its digital transformation strategy, it is migrating approximately 500 virtual servers from an on-premises VMware virtualization environment and 100 databases to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI. Hitachi Construction Machinery has already reduced its infrastructure operating costs by 20 percent while improving its online transaction processing performance by 50 percent and batching processing by 60 percent.
“OCI is the only public cloud that can securely migrate mission-critical databases running on Oracle Exadata and VMware virtualization environments since we can migrate quickly without configuration changes and reduce costs. Other clouds would have increased our costs due to having to rebuild applications,” said Noriko Momoki, senior officer and president, DX Promotion Group, Hitachi Construction Machinery. “The increased performance has significantly improved business processing time while reducing operational and management tasks, meaning our IT department can now focus on new projects to strengthen our business competitiveness.”
Lemtrans Improves Resiliency for Critical Railway Systems
Lemtrans is a leading private operator of railway vehicles in the Ukraine, operating more than 15,000 gondola cars that transport over 52 million tons of cargo annually. Lemtrans had an urgent need to transition critical processes and databases, including train scheduling and identity and access management, to the cloud. Lemtrans relied on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to quickly relocate its data and applications outside of the Ukraine, achieving greater resiliency while preserving its IT investments.
“Oracle Cloud VMware Solution was the perfect choice for us to ensure that our business would not be disrupted,” said Ivan Radchenko, head of IT department, Lemtrans. “The tools we use in OCI and our on-premises VMware environment are identical, which greatly simplified the migration of our data and VMs and provided more confidence in our business continuity. This helps us maintain the highest standard of quality for the Ukraine’s rail system.”
Mazda Motors Logistics Europe N.V. Consolidates Applications to Reduce Data Center Footprint
Mazda Motors Logistics Europe N.V. (MLE) is responsible for distributing cars and parts to European customers. MLE delivers spare parts directly to over 2,300 dealers and independent distributors in more than 30 European countries and vehicles to the ports of Barcelona, Antwerp, and Zeebrugge for European distribution. To achieve its goal of phasing out its data centers and modernizing its operations, MLE migrated 500 VMware VMs and consolidated an Oracle Exadata system into 80 Oracle Databases running on Exadata Database Service in OCI.
MLE also consolidated its business-critical applications into several software-defined data centers (SDDCs) with 12 hosts on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. As a result, MLE closed its two data centers in Frankfurt while maintaining the same high level of application customization and database compatibility.
“As a long-standing customer of both VMware and Oracle, it was important for us to maintain the operation and management of our virtual infrastructure as closely as possible,” said Leander Dierckx, cloud domain lead, Mazda Motors Logistics Europe N.V. “Migrating our racks of Exadata and VMs to OCI let us keep our data and workloads in one place. This had helped us increase our agility and productivity while reducing operational costs.”
