Deutsche See modernizes IT with multicloud architectures on OCI and Azure
April 19, 2024 | 7 minute read
Authored by: Wei Han, principal product marketing manager at Oracle, Jan Thomas Kettner, digital cloud sales representative at Oracle, and Sergiu Popovici, business development consultant at Oracle.
Figure 1: Deutchse See is a German fish and seafood company.
Deutsche See GmbH is a food manufacturer and online retailer based in Bremerhaven, Germany. The main business purpose is the processing and refining of fresh fish and seafood, and they sell to the catering trade, retail trade, and private customers. The company employs around 1,800 people and has more than 20 branches nationwide. It’s the market leader for fish and seafood in Germany and describes itself as Fischmanufaktur.
The production site is in Bremerhaven, where Deutsche See processes fish and seafood in three factories. The trading and production company maintains around 35,000 customer relationships. The clientele includes all kinds of gastronomy and as almost all large retail chains in Germany with fresh, frozen, and canned products. Since 2013, the products have also been sold through an online shop.
Goals for cloud migration
Deutsche See was looking to modernize its IT Infrastructure in 2021 and decided to go for a multicloud strategy with Oracle and Microsoft Azure in their Frankfurt data centers.
They had a few applications running on Oracle databases, which were migrated from Microsoft Azure to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). However, the migration took longer than expected, and they had a cyberattack in the winter of 2021, which affected their Azure deployment, but not their Oracle deployment. The migration was completed in April 2022.
“The combination of Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure forms a powerful alliance that optimizes costs and accelerates our business goals in this dynamic market. This partnership blends precision and quality, ensuring our success while unlocking a world of possibilities for growth and innovation,” says Lars Ketelsen, IT director at Deutsche See GmbH.
Suite of Oracle products used
OCI includes all the services needed to migrate, build, and run IT in the cloud, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud native applications and data platforms. Deutsche See used the following OCI services and technologies:
- Oracle Interconnect for Azure: Microsoft and Oracle have partnered to create a first-of-its-kind, interconnected cloud experience. Now, you can get a low-latency, high-throughput, private connection between two leading cloud providers, allowing you to use the best of OCI and Microsoft Azure with seamless interoperability.
- Oracle Base Database Service: Oracle Base Database Service runs Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition workloads on flexible virtual machine (VM) shapes in OCI. The service provides automated database lifecycle management that reduces administration, built-in low-code application development that accelerates new application deployment, and compute scaling with pay-as-you-go pricing that lowers costs.
- Oracle Autonomous Database: Develop scalable AI-powered apps with any data using built-in AI capabilities. Use your choice of large language model (LLM) and deploy in the cloud or your data center.
- Oracle Analytics Cloud: The Oracle Analytics platform is a cloud native service that provides the capabilities required to address the entire analytics process including data ingestion and modeling, data preparation and enrichment, and visualization and collaboration, without compromising security and governance. Embedded machine learning (ML) and natural language processing technologies help increase productivity and build an analytics-driven culture in organizations. Start on-premises or in the cloud—Oracle Analytics supports a hybrid deployment strategy, providing flexible paths to the cloud.
- Enterprise Manager Cloud Control: The Oracle Enterprise Manager family of products provides comprehensive solutions for monitoring, managing, testing, diagnosing, and optimizing today’s complex IT environments.<
- Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer: Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is an intuitive spontaneous query, reporting, analysis, and web publishing toolset that gives business users immediate access to information in databases.
- Oracle Data Guard: Oracle Active Data Guard ensures high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for enterprise data. Survive disasters and data corruption while creating, maintaining, and managing one or more synchronized standby databases.
- Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM): Oracle IAM solutions secure access to enterprise applications for both cloud and on-premises deployments.
- Oracle WebLogic Server: Oracle WebLogic Server is a unified and extensible platform for developing, deploying, and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and in the cloud. WebLogic Server offers a robust, mature, and scalable implementation of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) and Jakarta EE.
ISV products used
Deutsche See used the following products from independent software vendors (ISVs):
- TEAM Paderborn GmbH: As an Oracle Platinum Partner, TEAM GmbH specializes in the realization of IT solutions based on standard software and individual development.
- ProStore intralogistics and warehouse management: TEAM’s modular standard software for intralogistics and Warehouse Management. It optimizes logistical workflows within the company and provides the basis for maximum transparency of the internal flow of goods. The warehouse management system ProStore optimizes warehouse management as well as the logistical processes within the company creates the prerequisites for the highest possible transparency of intra-company goods flows and is geared towards logistics 4.0.
Deutsche See’s solution on OCI
Deutsche See migrated two enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the associated applications to OCI and Microsoft Azure and integrated with the Oracle Discoverer on OCI. The ERP applications are ProPlan for warehouse management and ProStore for inventory management, from TEAM Paderborn GmbH.
Deutsche See uses the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition High Performance for productions. The database size ranges from 7 GB–5 TB. Over 20 databases are migrated to OCI including production, staging, test, and dev environments. These databases are deployed in two availability domains in the OCI Frankfurt region for high availability. The databases in two availability domains are synced up using Data Guard. All databases are encrypted with transparent data encryption (TDE).
Deutsche See uses online transactional processing (OLTP) database instances for their warehouse and inventory management applications and OLAP databases for controlling and sales. They use Oracle Analytics Cloud to extract and analyze data from their warehouse and inventory management applications.
Deutsche See deployed a multicloud split stack solution for the common data service (CDS) Capplication, a self-developed customer relationship management (CRM) system. The CDS application stack runs on Azure, and the database runs on OCI with Oracle Interconnect for Azure to provide the dedicated high-bandwidth and low-latency network connection.
Deutsche See implemented the dedicated and virtual network connection to Azure and OCI. The on-premises connects to Azure through three ExpressRoutes, using global reach to connect ExpressRoutes to each other. It’s distributed with border gateway protocol (BGP). Azure connects to OCI through the Interconnect. The on-premises facilities are connected to Azure and OCI through a VPN as the backup.
Figure 2: Deutsche See’s technical architecture
Migration path
Deutsche See utilizes the following partners to design, migrate, and manage the applications in the cloud:
- The Cloud Lift Team was included in the offering during the sales process and designed the architecture.
- Oracle Customer Success Services won the contract for the migration.
- The partner TEAM Paderborn GmbH subsequently won the managed service contract to run and operate the environment.
The customer was initially inclined to fully move to Microsoft Azure, but the price-performance advantage of Oracle on Oracle was compelling enough to move the Oracle database workloads to OCI. Deutsche See deployed a multicloud solution to use the best-of-breed services from OCI and Azure with the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure through the official Microsoft and Oracle partnership.
“As a leader in the fish and seafood industry, we understand the importance of diversifying our resources to deliver excellence to our customers,” says Lars Ketelsen, IT director at Deutsche See GmbH. “Our decision to embrace a multicloud strategy with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure has been instrumental in achieving our goals of cost optimization, enhanced flexibility, and robust security. By leveraging the strengths of multiple cloud providers, we have unlocked new levels of agility and scalability, empowering us to keep pace with the rapidly evolving demands of our business. This strategic approach not only ensures the freshest fish and seafood reach our customers but also reinforces our commitment to their trust and satisfaction. At Deutsche See, our multicloud journey is a testament to our unwavering dedication to quality, innovation, and exceeding expectations in every aspect of our operations.”
Results
Since the summer of 2022, Deutsche See has been fully live with their 19c databases on OCI. Deutsche See can now seamlessly scale their environments according to their needs, especially during their business peaks before Christmas and Easter. While in the past they had to be licensed for these peaks, now, they can accordingly adjust their costs, which allows Deutsche See to optimize costs while meeting the peak business demand.
Overall, Deutsche See has benefited from the Cloud Lift team's architecture on OCI and the use of Oracle ACS for migration, and they continue to work with Oracle for their future projects.
Next steps
Deutsche See has started to replace Oracle Discoverer with Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) for their data warehouse. After also evaluating Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI), Deutsche See opted for OAC for the seamless integration of Oracle’s complete data management platform.
The customer is currently working with Oracle Consulting on expanding their data warehouse running on an Oracle database to a fully autonomous enterprise data warehouse and making use of integrated machine learning to generate insights for their controlling and their sales organization.
Learn more
For more information on Deutsche See and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, see the following resources: