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Technical Services Upgrade

Open Universities Australia

Head Office – Docklands, Melbourne www.open.edu.au

Industry

Higher Education

Employees

200+/60,000 active (250,000+ client base)

Program (Budget: $4M)

Alchemy

Program objective

Increaserevenue by customers successfully completing their online enrolments by simplifying the End-to-End enrolment process underpinned by a cloud infrastructure and remain regulatory compliant

Cloud9 Services

Technical Services –Oracle PeopleSoft v9.2 upgrade

Oracle People Soft v9.2 upgrade & Cloud Deployment

This University is the leading online higher education provider in Australia since 1993 with degree offerings from Australia’s leading universities. They have helped 250,000+ with their education and career goals.

Cloud9 was engaged to assist in the upgrade of Oracle PeopleSoft v9.2 (ERP) as part of their revamped digital student end-to-end enrolment process. The engagement was carried out utilising a hybrid Agile delivery approach with multiple vendors (Avanade for Web/UX, BlueWolf for Salesforce,Bryte for Data Architecture, LeapFrog for Course/content management and Base2 for Infrastructure DeveOPs) system integrators as well as SME’s.

From an upgrade perspective, Cloud9 was commissioned to perform the following:

  • Assist in configuring Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Machine images to run the PeopleSoft 9.2 / PeopleTools 9.55 application.
  • Install and configure the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.2 Image 5 application and deploy a Demo environment for reference and a System environment for upgrade development.
  • Configure separate Web / App / Bat / ElasticSearch server instances to allow for horizontal scaling of servers.
  • Provide Environment Management services to provision the necessary Development, Testing and ultimately Production environments.
  • Data Migration of identified data from current version environments into upgrade version environments, with necessary data transformation and manipulation.

Challenges

  • Opted not to continue Oracle Support during the upgrade to save on costs, meaning access to application / technical patches and other support knowledge bases and support requests was not possible.
  • Opted to provision AWS instances using CentOS Linux rather than RedHat Linux to save on costs. This was not a certified operating system and issues were encountered during initial installation and configuration tasks.
  • AWS Database Cloud was not readily accessible for database creation / cloning tasks with dependencies on staff for assistance, often delaying environment creation.
  • Delays by other vendors in the project meant that full integration testing was extremely limited, directly impacting on the accuracy of the data migration / transformation process.

Solutions

Cloud9 worked with internal teams (Oracle Database Administrator, Network Administrator, Windows Engineer, Active Directory Administrator) and Managed Service providers (BASE2) to:

  • Provision cloud formation processes that allow for the scripted creation of scalable Web/App/Bat/ElasticSearch servers for each environment according to parameters.
  • Scripted configuration of Web/App/Bat/ElasticSearch domains for application use.
  • Creation and population of Oracle Database from cloned images.
  • Manual upgrade processes including:
    • People Tools Upgrade to Copy of Production to use as Data Migration source
    • Data Migration scripts to extract from Data Migration source and import into new Upgrade target

Deliverables

  • Fully scalable environment in which each server type can be re-provisioned and auto-scaled both manually and by event (i.e. server outage, performance threshold).
  • Scripted creation of application domains to allow servers to function as part of the environment automatically.
  • Detailed documentation of both manual environment build and data migration processes, as well as automated Cloud Formation procedures.