San Jose Water moves to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, lifts app performance 50%
Serving approximately one million residents in the greater San Jose area, the utility gains performance improvements while becoming future-ready.
“San Jose Water selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution because it could operate as an extension of the company’s on-premises environment. It allowed the team to move legacy workloads faster, while enjoying the same ease of management, scalability, security, and full admin rights as on-premises.”
Business challenges
San Jose Water (SJW), which services the operations, maintenance, billing, and backflow testing of utilities, was looking for a way to move its virtual environment for numerous on-premises systems to the cloud.
Aging, costly, and hard-to-scale on-premises IT infrastructure stood in the way of the company’s ability to scale its business. VMware workloads included legacy customer care billing applications, WebLogic, and Crystal Reports, all of which were running on an older Oracle Database and Windows version.
Looking to the future, SJW also wanted to overcome challenges by collecting additional insights to optimize operations.
SJW was familiar with Oracle products, and satisfied with the service from Oracle based on prior experience.
Why San Jose Water chose Oracle
Instead of performing a hardware refresh for legacy applications on-premises, SJW selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, which operates as an extension of the company’s on-premises environment.
In 2020, SJW completed a proof of concept with Oracle that included a mock cutover and production cutover. Networking and knowledge of application versions were successful, and Oracle support was also a win. SJW decided to move its virtual environments from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
SJW settled on a multicloud strategy that would take advantage of the unique strengths of both OCI and Microsoft Azure.
Running Oracle Database, WebLogic, and applications on Oracle offered San Jose Water the best performance and the easiest migration path. The utility company moved these existing workloads to OCI over a single weekend with minor modifications.
Results
Using OCI, SJW replaced aging infrastructure using existing licenses on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The utility achieved a faster migration by moving VMs as-is with no legacy application changes.
With Oracle Cloud VMWare Solution, SJW’s IT administrators now manage software versions certified for production operations. IT decides when patches and upgrades are applied. IT staff also has root access to the cloud infrastructure, allowing for fine-tuning of business application performance management. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides full Layer-2 network control.
SJW was able to operate on-premises and in the cloud during the migration. The company taps the best of both OCI and Microsoft Azure, using Azure for user authentication (LDAP) when logging into OCI, and also deploying LDAP servers in OCI.
SJW is using Rubrik to back up application server VMs in the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and database servers running on Oracle Compute instances. SJW partnered with Oracle Cloud Lift Services for the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution implementation.
About the customer
Founded in 1866, San Jose Water is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SJW Group. One of the most technologically sophisticated utilities providers, San Jose Water serves more than one million people through about 231,000 connections in the greater San Jose metropolitan area.