Oracle Solaris Migration to AWS
___For Legacy Landscapes
_____About the Customer…
Tabuk Cement Company (TCC), a leading cement manufacturer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, faced a critical infrastructure challenge: its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) R12 environment was running on ageing, end-of-life SPARC/Solaris hardware, with no secondary physical site available for Disaster Recovery (DR).
- The organisation needed a solution that would ensure business continuity, avoid large capital expenditure, and extend the life of existing systems while maintaining compliance and operational reliability.
Cloudwrxs, leveraging its AWS expertise and collaboration with Stromasys, engaged with TCC to design a low-risk, cost-effective approach that would enable the company to modernise its DR setup without replacing its production SPARC servers.
The Customer__ Challenge.
TCC’s primary trigger for seeking an alternative solution was the absence of a second physical location to host a DR site. As a result, the company needed a reliable, cloud-based DR strategy that could replicate their Oracle EBS workloads without performing a full platform migration or replacing production hardware.
The environment was configured in an active-passive model, but it suffered from a fundamental limitation:
The entire production workload operated from a single physical site with no secondary disaster recovery (DR) centre.
This created several key risks:
Single Point of Failure for Critical ERP Workloads
TCC’s entire Oracle EBS ecosystem operated from one physical data centre, leaving the business vulnerable to catastrophic downtime in the event of an incident.
Ageing SPARC Hardware with Limited Vendor Support
The legacy infrastructure required costly maintenance and had limited availability of replacement parts, raising ongoing operational risk.
Incompatibility with Major Cloud Platforms
Solaris workloads could not run natively on hyperscaler clouds, preventing a straightforward lift-and-shift migration and requiring specialised emulation technology.
High Customisation of Oracle EBS
Extensive custom code and performance-intensive processes demanded precise resource sizing and careful migration planning to ensure stable DR performance.
Requirement to Preserve Existing Production Investment
TCC needed a DR solution that extended the life of SPARC assets still under vendor support until 2034, without forcing an immediate re-platforming or production migration.
TCC sought a modern DR solution that would not require re-architecting, re-platforming or replacing their core legacy applications, yet would offer resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Cloudwrxs Migration ___& Implementation Steps.
Cloudwrxs established IAM guardrails, logging, encryption baselines, and compliance controls to ensure the DR environment was secure, auditable, and aligned with enterprise governance.
Dedicated EC2 instances were deployed for the application tier, database tier, and license server, ensuring optimal performance for Solaris-in-Cloud workloads.
The SPARC emulation layer was configured, validated, and tuned to replicate the customer’s on-premise Solaris environment, enabling seamless Oracle EBS operation in the cloud.
Backup restoration, application tier reconstruction, and Oracle Data Guard replication were implemented to mirror production state and maintain continuous synchronisation.
Cloudwrxs ran comprehensive test cycles including RTO validation, rollback enablement, failover execution, and performance benchmarking to ensure operational readiness.
After DR stabilisation, Cloudwrxs built a fresh UAT environment using Docker-based controlled builds, enabling TCC to test future changes without relying on ageing hardware.
The Partner__Solution.
Through Cloudwrxs’ cloud migration expertise and modernised DR architecture, TCC achieved measurable improvements across business continuity, operational efficiency, and IT resilience.
How AWS Service were used:
Amazon EC2
AWS EC2 instances provided the scalable compute layer required to run the Charon-SSP SPARC emulation.
AWS KMS
Ensured disk-level encryption across all DR resources, strengthening compliance and safeguarding sensitive data.
Amazon S3
S3’s object storage was used to store application and database backups, ensuring 11 nines of durability and rapid restoration capabilities.
AWS CloudFormation
CloudFormation templates allowed Cloudwrxs to deploy DR resources consistently across multiple environments.
Amazon VPC
The customer’s DR environment was deployed inside an AWS Virtual Private Cloud, providing network segmentation, routing control, and secure connectivity aligned with enterprise security policies.
AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch metrics, logs, and alarms were used to monitor emulator performance, Oracle EBS availability, replication health, and system utilisation—allowing proactive issue detection and optimisation.
AWS IAM
Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies ensured that only authorised personnel could access the DR environment, supporting audit requirements and maintaining governance integrity.
AWS Auto Scaling and Flexible Instance Sizing
Although DR ran on modest instance sizes for cost efficiency, AWS allowed the environment to scale up to larger EC2 shapes when needed—ensuring Oracle EBS performance stability during failover or testing.
How Services Were Delivered
Cloudwrxs handled the full lifecycle of the migration, including:
- Assessment workshops
- Architecture design
- Cost modeling
- Migration to AWS
Post-migration Cloudwrxs provided:
- 24×7 managed services—patching
- Backup monitoring
- DR drills
- Security audits
- Patching and operating system maintenance
These services ensured that the mission-critical environment remained secure, compliant, and continuously optimised.
Business__Outcomes.
Establishing an Oracle EBS Disaster Recovery (DR) not only ensures compliance with regulatory standards but also has a significant and positive impact on a company’s business continuity plan, as it will ensure that critical business operations continue with minimal disruption in case of unforeseen incidents.
Business Continuity & Resilience
Before Migration
A single physical site hosted all Oracle EBS workloads, creating a high risk of total operational shutdown during an incident.
After AWS Migration
A fully operational AWS-based DR site ensures rapid recovery within defined RTOs, maintaining business continuity even during disruptions.
Cost Efficiency
Before Migration
Rising maintenance costs, dependency on scarce SPARC hardware components, and power-intensive on-premise systems increased operational expenses.
After AWS Migration
Elastic AWS resources eliminated hardware maintenance costs, reduced power consumption, and allowed cost-optimised DR operations.
Pathway to Modernisation
Before Migration
A legacy Solaris environment limited innovation and made future modernisation—such as Solaris-to-Linux migration—complex and high risk.
After AWS Migration
Workloads are now cloud-hosted, enabling a smoother, lower-risk modernisation journey using AWS-native tooling and scalable cloud frameworks.
Operational Efficiency
Before Migration
Manual processes, limited visibility, and reactive monitoring slowed IT operations and increased operational burden.
After AWS Migration
AWS CloudWatch, automated backups, and managed services improved visibility, reduced manual intervention, and enhanced IT team productivity.
Compliance
Before Migration
Legacy hardware and single-site dependency posed challenges for meeting regulatory, audit, and resilience standards.
After AWS Migration
AWS security controls, encrypted environments, and documented DR processes ensured compliance with governance and audit requirements.
About Cloudwrxs
…
Cloudwrxs is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in migrating and managing SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft workloads on AWS. Cloudwrxs provides end-to-end professional and managed services—assessment, migration, modernization, and ongoing optimization—to help enterprises maximize the benefits of AWS.
