HFM Upgrade and Migration to Azure for Tesco

Tesco is a leading retailer based in the United Kingdom with over 300,000 employees and a presence in multiple countries across the world, serving over 30 million customers weekly.

Tesco needed to address performance issues with their Oracle EPM Application Suite (Hyperion), hosted on Gen 1 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Customer Challenge

Tesco needed to address performance issues with their Oracle EPM Application Suite (Hyperion), hosted on Gen 1 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

In addition to performance issues, Tesco wanted to take the opportunity to address technical debt in their EPM estate as part of any platform migration, with the Windows 2008 platform and EPM Suite version coming to the end of their support lifecycle. A final requirement was to exit Oracle OCI Gen 1 as it was being retired. Version 1 was engaged to assess and migrate to the most suitable platform from three options – OCI Gen 2, Tesco Private Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.

Why Version 1?

Version 1 is a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Infrastructure Azure and Security.

Version 1 is also an Oracle Partner and has made a significant investment in tools, methodologies, and IP, complemented by deep expertise in Oracle, Azure, and software license management. This all serves to alleviate concerns, mitigate risk, accelerate, and help realise the benefit of Azure for Oracle workloads.

As part of the multi-phase approach to the migration of Tesco’s EPM Suite from OCI to Azure, Version 1 leveraged an adaptation of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, with a Well-Architected Review built around Version 1 industry experiences coupled with cloud providers’ best practices. This framework allows flexibility toward changing requirements while maintaining industry best practice throughout. Version 1 was also able to engage long-term partner Amosca to provide expertise related to the Oracle EPM Suite.

Solution Delivered

In Quarter 1 2020, Version 1 was engaged to complete a discovery exercise on Tesco’s OCI Gen 1 estate to assess cloud migration target options, alongside the costs for migration, license changes, and consumption costs.

Microsoft Azure was selected as the target migration platform as it aligned with Tesco’s public cloud strategy and was more cost-effective from a licensing perspective than Tesco’s Private Cloud. The Oracle EPM Suite was identified as the top priority for migration to Azure.

Tesco and Version 1, supported by Amosca, undertook a two-phase migration of Tesco’s EPM Application Suite to Microsoft Azure. Version 1 provided Delivery Management, Technical Architecture, Oracle Database services, Azure Platform, and DevOps capabilities. Amosca provided expertise in Hyperion design, configuration, testing, and support.

Assessment, Design, and Planning activities were completed in Phase 1, including:
• A High-Level Design for hosting the EPM Suite in Microsoft Azure.
• A detailed project plan and delivery costs for the deployment of the Azure environment, application and database layers, and support for migration preparation and go-live activities.

Phase 2 includes a Low-Level Design the deployment of the Azure environment and migration of the EPM Suite to Azure.

This included an upgrade of the HFM application and Operating Systems. Version 1 and Amosca delivered a new Azure Platform for hosting the EPM Application Suite. Phase 2 included the following activities:

• A Low-Level Design for hosting the EPM Suite in Microsoft Azure including Azure consumption costs, platform, application and database layers, Disaster Recovery, networking, storage, and security components.
• Delivery of a highly available, resilient Azure solution across two Azure regions using Oracle Dataguard and cloud-native Azure Highly Available services.
• Deployment of Network, Server, Storage, Load Balancing, Backup, Databases, Disaster Recovery, and Security across Production, DR, Pre-Production, SIT and Development Environments to host the EPM Application Suite.
• An upgrade of the HFM Application to 11.2.7.
• Deployment of a time-limited sandbox environment to review HFM 11.2.
• Upgrade of platform Operating Systems, Windows 2008 to Windows 2019, and Oracle Linux 6.10 to Oracle Linux 7.9.
  • Upgrade of Oracle 12c to Oracle 19c.

Phase 2 addressed the support risks associated with HFM 11.2.4 and Windows 2008. The migration path to Azure was extremely innovative, as was the decision to host the EPM Suite in Microsoft Azure. At the time of this engagement, there were minimal examples of hosting Oracle EPM in Azure, and no examples globally of migration of EPM from OCI to Azure.

The environment deployed in Phase 2 used an adaptation of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, with a Well-Architected Review built around Version 1 industry experiences coupled with cloud providers’ best practices governed by the well-defined Tesco Azure guardrails. The framework used allowed flexibility toward changing requirements while maintaining industry best practice throughout.

During later stages of Phase 2, Version 1 and Amosca provided support to Tesco’s Engineering team in the following areas:

• Shadowing and Reverse Shadowing of upgrades to the HFM Application across Pre-Production and Production environments. This enabled the Tesco Engineering team to familarise themselves with an environment that would move into their support teams.
• Support for Disaster Recovery Testing, OCI Data Refresh activities, Parallel Runs 1 and 2, and Hypercare support for the post go-live period. This enabled Tesco to complete activities required to prepare and test the environment ahead of go-live.

The project had an extremely high profile with recurring calls attended by Directors from both Tesco and Version 1 to ensure continued commitment to successful delivery. Both Tesco and Version 1 worked with Microsoft to ensure continued vendor support through the engagement.

Tesco executed go-live activities over the weekend of the 30th and 31st of July and completed a Hypercare support period post go-live. The end of Hypercare marked a successful end to 2 years and 10 months of engagement spanning Discovery, Assessment & Design, Deployment, Testing, and Go Live phases.

Real Differences…

…Delivered.

Tesco has identified the following business benefits:

• Support for critical Finance systems.
• Reduced dependency on Oracle, and a fully documented architecture, enable Tesco to respond more quickly to issues.
• Reduced dependency on Oracle also gives Tesco more control over its data.
• Decoupling from Fusion reduces the downtime in EPM Applications, as EPM still remains active when Fusion is down.
• Improved system performance – significantly quicker consolidations and FDMEE data loads in Azure vs OCI.

Key Data and Stats

•  The number of users running Data Load scenarios during Performance Testing shows an improvement of between 50% and 90% in the time to execute.
• Group Consolidations run between 90% and 300% faster.
• FDMEE Data Extracts run between 300% and 1,000% faster, depending on the loading.
• CPU and Memory usage is down between 30% and 50%. In some cases, usage of 10% in OCI has been noted.

About Version 1

Version 1 has been working in the Microsoft Cloud technology arena since 2006 and today is recognised as one of the most competent partners in the UK and Irish markets. With broad and deep expertise across the Microsoft stack, Version 1 can look beyond specific requirements to underlying customer issues and identify integrated solutions that leverage the entire technology stack. We have been on the Azure Partner Circle since 2013 and are Azure FastTrack Enabled.