The big data centre move is on! Here is everything you need to know about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Over the years, many of you have asked and asked, and asked “when will NS have a data centre in our region?”. We have been the same boat as many of our customers as Liberate I.T. uses NetSuite extensively for our finances, time entries and billings, and our CRM. After a few false starts I can finally say, it’s happening. In fact for some of you, it’s already happened.

So, what is OCI?

So what’s OCI – it stands for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Which, in short, is the next generation of data centres.

It also continues NetSuite’s concept of the company you’re licensing software from should also own the data centres….and this isn’t so with all ERPs systems. Many outsource the security of their customers data to 3rd parties.

When Oracle purchased NetSuite, it was a no-brainer to stop investing in NetSuite-owned infrastructure and instead more to Oracles existing and state of the art facilities.

OCI builds on the foundation of compute, storage, and network resources – the stuff you pay your licence for to ensure the secure and reliable transmission and storage of your data. With OCI Gen2 Cloud, NetSuite can now start working with advanced capabilities that are built-in and ready to use – such as adaptive security, different kinds of storage, virtual networking, machine learning, and AI. And because it’s cloud, all the data centres are linked in real time, meaning more efficient roll-outs of functionality and fixes.

In fact, as I understand the delay in the shift since Oracle’s purchase of NetSuite was due to a re-thinking of how the infrastructure should work. In the beginning of the migration to OCI, they started with a “lift-and-shift” approach and that was reasonably quick and easy to move numerous applications onto the Cloud platform. Literally in a couple of months the core services were up and running in the Cloud. But it was simply using the new technology as they had their old data centres – and the simple approach would limit NS to using the Cloud OCI as just another data centre. So they spent some time thinking about the future – how best to take advantage of the myriad of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) technologies available on OCI for customers. The new OCI is more than just data centres, the Cloud solution architects have re-envisioned the future of NetSuite’s infrastructure.

NetSuite’s disaster recovery plan has been re-built from the ground up, and by offering a multitude of available domains OCI constantly runs an elastic backup platform and division of customers so a failure in one part of OCI won’t even be noticed by other users. This means no more ANZ-wide outages.

The millions of transactions per day and terabytes of data will be managed more efficiently which should see improved speeds.

OCI has distributed regions – which will reinforce the provision of on-demand services such as maintenance and patching in a convenient window within the proximity. As mentioned, customer accounts will be segregated to more and smaller virtual data centres, reducing the ‘blast radius’ and limit the effect of incidents to a smaller group of customers.

Finally, this is Oracle’s business – they commit to deploying the latest and fastest computing and storage technologies with OCI which means NetSuite is always going to be on the highest performance machines.

OCI roll out

Over the next 18 months, NetSuite is moving all 24,000 customers from the current 8 legacy data centres to OCI data centres.

For NetSuite’s infrastructure, they have chosen not to use all of Oracles infrastructure, instead splitting the world into 12 connected regions, based in locations where Oracle have facilities. These are  North America, South America, 2 regions in Europe, Japan and Australia. Each data centre has an active pair which means customers will be on one primary data centre, with their data actively backed up on its pair, and which all transmissions can be swapped over to in emergency.

In the ANZ region, where we’ll all be migrated, one is in Sydney and its active pair is in Melbourne. This means if your primary data centre site is in Melbourne, your disaster recovery site is the Sydney centre, and vice versa

As you can imagine, it’s taken some time to get the tech right, but that’s also what you’re buying when you pay your licence, making the tech infrastructure someone else’s problem so you can focus on what you do best. But as mentioned at the start – the big migration is on. Soon no ANZ sites will be hosted in the USA. In fact, some of you will have already been migrated. If you’re not sure you can find where your primary data centre in your NetSuite system – in the Admin role go to Setup/Company Information and it shows your data centre on the right hand column, half way down.

For those, still to be migrated, the process begins with an email from NS informing you of the impending move, which will always be over a week-end. After that, there is nothing you need to do.

If you have any questions or concerns about the data centre move, please reach out to the Liberate I.T. Support team.