Modernizing mission-critical Oracle E-Business Suite on AWS: A success story in migration and optimization

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) has been the standard for high-availability mission-critical applications in government and enterprises, requiring specialized on-premises infrastructure including high-end servers, storage area networks (SANs), and dedicated networking. While effective for specific use cases, RAC presents challenges including high operational costs from licensing, infrastructure, and skilled personnel requirements. Its complexity can lead to increased downtime, and many implementations result in underutilized capabilities despite substantial investments.

Organizations are increasingly moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to shift from CapEx to OpEx models and leverage enhanced scalability through solutions like U7i instances, which offer up to 32 TiB DDR5 memory and 1920 vCPUs. AWS provides improved disaster recovery capabilities and access to managed services, addressing traditional RAC challenges such as hardware refresh cycles and disaster recovery complexity.

However, moving RAC to AWS requires fundamental architectural changes due to differences in storage and clustering mechanisms. Organizations need to carefully assess how AWS handles high availability for Oracle databases, including solutions like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle, as well as performance trade-offs compared to traditional shared-disk RAC environments. The key to successful implementation lies in evaluating specific workload requirements first, rather than defaulting to RAC, as AWS offers several cost-effective alternatives for high availability. In this blog, we will discuss how government agencies can evaluate and implement AWS alternatives to traditional Oracle RAC deployments while maintaining mission-critical availability.

Architecture and resiliency

FSx for ONTAP storage architecture

Fully Managed File System FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a storage solution for Oracle E-Business Suite on AWS, delivering resilience, automation, and efficiency. The solution uses a dual-node configuration across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) with synchronous data replication, ensuring zero data loss during failovers. It supports both Network File System (NFS) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocols, implements automated failover mechanisms with continuous health monitoring, and offers cross-AZ data synchronization and storage redundancy. SnapMirror technology enhances disaster recovery, while storage efficiency is achieved through deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning. Performance optimization leverages memory-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances (R6i/X2 series), high-throughput networking (C5n), FSx for ONTAP intelligent caching, and auto-tiering capabilities. The architecture also employs strategic use of placement groups, Elastic Fabric Adapter, and hybrid connectivity via Transit Gateway and Direct Connect, resulting in an enterprise-grade storage solution specifically tuned for Oracle database workloads.

The following figure shows the storage architecture.

Figure 1. Architecture diagram showing Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on AWS using FSx for NetApp ONTAP

The preceding figure illustrates a multi-region Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on AWS using FSx for NetApp ONTAP. The primary region (Region-1) features a three-tier architecture with web, application, and database layers spread across multiple Availability Zones for high availability. Region-2 serves as a disaster recovery site with a similar but simplified setup. Both regions are connected through Internet Gateway, with FSx for NetApp ONTAP providing storage solutions and Snap Mirror enabling data replication between regions. The architecture demonstrates a resilient and scalable enterprise deployment leveraging AWS services and FSx storage capabilities.

Simplified management

FSx for ONTAP simplifies mission-critical database storage management through automated operations. As a fully managed service, it handles infrastructure provisioning, hardware maintenance, and software updates—reducing the specialized expertise needed for daily operations. The service automates backup management with customizable retention policies and cross-AZ replication, while system patching occurs during defined maintenance windows to minimize disruption.

Through CloudWatch integration, FSx for ONTAP provides real-time monitoring of storage performance, capacity utilization, and system health. The service automatically scales storage resources based on workload demands, eliminating manual capacity planning. This automation reduces operational overhead, minimizes human error, and allows IT teams to focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.

Scalability

FSx for ONTAP transforms storage scalability compared to traditional RAC environments. Storage capacity can scale from gigabytes to terabytes without downtime through the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API calls. The service features elastic sizing, automatically adjusting storage volumes based on usage patterns, eliminating the need for overprovisioning.

The solution enables independent scaling of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and throughput, while intelligent data tiering automatically moves less-accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers. FSx for ONTAP integrates with AWS services for coordinated scaling of compute, storage, and networking resources, providing flexibility to meet changing business demands without hardware constraints. This approach allows organizations to pay for actual usage while maintaining performance and high availability across multiple Availability Zones.

Performance

FSx for ONTAP combines AWS infrastructure with ONTAP technology to deliver enterprise storage with advanced data efficiency features like inline deduplication, adaptive compression, and ML-driven storage tiering. The platform leverages Flash Cache and NVRAM write cache technologies, along with AWS’s ultra-low latency networking, to deliver sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS performance. Through continuous monitoring and auto-tuning capabilities, the system optimizes storage behavior for different workload patterns, typically achieving better price-performance ratios than traditional on-premises solutions, while features like thin provisioning and deduplication help reduce overall storage costs and Input/Output (I/O) operations.

Cost-efficiency

FSx for ONTAP on AWS transforms enterprise storage economics by shifting from CapEx to OpEx. This cloud-based model eliminates upfront investments in hardware and infrastructure, common in traditional Oracle RAC deployments. The pay-as-you-go pricing aligns costs with actual usage, avoiding overprovisioning and idle capacity. The solution offers dynamic resource allocation and automated storage tiering for cost optimization, while reducing storage administration costs by 30-50 percent. It eliminates hardware refresh cycles and includes built-in data protection features. Organizations benefit from granular cost tracking, improved financial planning, and the option for reserved instance pricing, offering up to 72 percent savings. Overall, FSx for ONTAP typically delivers a 40-60 percent reduction in total cost of ownership over three years compared to traditional RAC environments, while maintaining performance and reliability.

Disaster recovery

FSx for ONTAP provides government agencies with advanced disaster recovery capabilities for Oracle E-Business Suite applications. Using SnapMirror technology, it enables efficient block-level replication across AWS Regions, delivering Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of seconds and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of minutes. The solution supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication, with automated failover testing through FlexClone technology.

The platform integrates with AWS services including Amazon Route 53, AWS Application Migration Service, and AWS Systems Manager for comprehensive disaster recovery orchestration. It offers automated recovery procedures, real-time monitoring, and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 compliant encryption. Storage efficiency features like deduplication and compression reduce costs across replication streams, while tiered storage options help optimize disaster recovery (DR) budgets. This approach eliminates the need for duplicate infrastructure investments typical in traditional RAC-based DR solutions, while meeting government operational and regulatory requirements.

Conclusion

The transition from Oracle RAC to FSx for ONTAP on AWS represents a transformative shift in managing mission-critical applications, with organizations reporting 40-60 percent reduction in total cost of ownership over three years.

While Oracle RAC remains viable for specific use cases, FSx for ONTAP delivers comparable or superior high availability with 99.99 percent availability and sub-millisecond latency, challenging the traditional notion that RAC is essential for enterprise-grade reliability and performance.

Success in this transition requires careful planning and assessment of application architecture, performance requirements, compliance needs, existing skillsets, and total cost analysis. Organizations can adopt hybrid strategies, maintaining RAC for specific workloads while leveraging FSx for ONTAP for others. The combination of FSx for ONTAP and AWS services provides comprehensive features in high availability, disaster recovery, performance optimization, and security, delivering enterprise capabilities without the complexity and cost traditionally associated with RAC deployments. As cloud services continue to evolve, organizations embracing this transition position themselves to leverage future innovations while maintaining the reliability and performance their critical applications demand.

To begin your organization’s journey towards optimizing Oracle workloads with FSx for ONTAP on AWS, reach out to your AWS account team for guidance to help develop a customized transition strategy tailored to your specific needs and objectives.