Retirement planning company moves to the cloud with help from Pythian
A retirement planning company wanted to reduce licensing costs and eliminate operational and maintenance costs by exploring the idea of moving their databases to the public cloud platform. Pythian recommended and implemented a migration to a SQL Server and Microsoft Azure.
Our client is a large American online retirement planning company whose services include managed IRAs, 401 (k) advice and management, and retirement income planning. The client is the first company of its kind to use the internet for retirement planning, providing advice and management to 1.5 million people for almost 20 years.
Pythian has been a strategic partner for close to 10 years, providing Oracle DBA support for their on-premises servers. Throughout this time, Pythian has managed backups, installed patches, and handled performance tuning and maintenance. Recently, this client was considering switching from Oracle to another RDBMS to reduce licensing costs—which were hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Pythian suggested changing the RDBMS to Microsoft SQL Server and migrating to Microsoft Azure to eliminate ongoing operational support and maintenance of hardware in their data center.
What we did
Provided vendor-agnostic cloud consulting and migration advice as well as managed services—an end-to-end engagement as a trusted partner
Performed a feasibility study on migrating from Oracle to SQL Server; analyzed all of the data types, store procedures, and the schema on the company’s Oracle database, then verified that the data itself and the application were ideally suited to SQL Server
Recommended a migration to a SQL Server environment and provided a proposal for implementing the migration
Provided Cloud Migration Services to convert one of their clients from Oracle to SQL Server and hosting the infrastructure in Microsoft Azure; this was a proof-of-concept (PoC) project (all other clients remained on Oracle and the on-premises servers)
Providing continued managed services for the two environments to support all of the client’s needs with site reliability engineering and monitoring for the six-month PoC testing period
Technologies used
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Azure
Key Outcomes
Pythian is currently supporting the PoC migration with managed services and awaiting the end of the PoC testing period to complete the move to the cloud.
