BITS Pilani migrated their PeopleSoft systems to Oracle Autonomous Database

BITS Pilani is a premier higher education institute in India offering various undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the fields of science and technology. BITS Pilani, a deemed to be university under section 3 of the UGC Act 1956, has been in the higher education industry for about six decades. It is one of the three privately funded institutes identified as an “Institute of Eminence” by the Ministry of Education, Government of India in the year 2018. BITS Pilani has four established campuses—Pilani (Rajasthan), Goa, Hyderabad, and Dubai—and one virtual campus offering undergraduate and postgraduate programs for working professionals.

BITS Pilani has been a user of PeopleSoft HCM, ERP, and Campus Solutions for several years. The PeopleSoft systems were initially on-premises and were moved to OCI a few years ago. BITS Pilani experiences a spike in system usage at the beginning of every academic year and this increase requires scaling up of both middle and database tiers. BITS Pilani would build and maintain a more than optimum mid-tier stack throughout the year to handle the high demand during the student registration and examination periods.

To handle this, BITS Pilani was looking for a solution that could:

• Quickly scale up and scale down both database and middle tiers to process varying workload demands during student registrations and examinations.
• Improve the performance for PeopleSoft users.
• Optimize operational costs.

Solution

Peoplesoft systems at BITS Pilani were moved to Oracle Autonomous Database–Serverless (ADB-S), which provides features like a self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database management system out of the box. This resulted in scalability and performance management at the database tier.

This resulted in lowering the overall cloud resources costs.

The Oracle Center of Excellence worked with the BITS Pilani team to help move PeopleSoft to ADB-S at various stages of the project including:

• Assessment and planning: Evaluating existing infrastructure and identifying key areas for optimization.
• Implementation: Deploying PeopleSoft on Oracle Autonomous Database–Shared improving scalability and performance.
• Optimization: Collaborating with Oracle technical team to run a load and stress testing cycle, and fine-tune performance of the overall system based on the initial observations.

Oracle Zero Downtime Migration, a premier automated solution for migrating Oracle databases into ADB-S, was used to migrate the database tier to ADB-S, reducing the chance of human errors during the migration cycle.

Overall results

• With ADB-S, BITS Pilani has a more scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure.
• Approximately a 50% improvement in performance.
• A 30% reduction in infrastructure cost for running PeopleSoft.
• Reduced the effort to prepare for admission season from seven days to less than 48 hours.
• Ability to register over 16,000 students in a single day due to the accelerated system performance.