Mars Veterinary Health: Modernized With a SaaS and PaaS Solution in Oracle Cloud
As a growing company, Mars Veterinary Health (MVH) had legacy technology with lots performance issues. To improve performance, they decided to move most of their workloads to Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), and their software-as-a-service (SaaS) workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Mars Veterinary Health (MVH) is part of a business ecosystem with one common purpose: Working together to improve the lives of veterinary professionals, pets, and clients and to make the pets' world better. They have locations in more than 20 countries with nine banners in 2,500 hospitals.
MVH made the following key changes:
- They moved from IPSec VPN services with basic connectivity to FastConnect with a bigger network to take advantage of SaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services.
- They moved from a legacy version of database-as-a-service to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing.
- They moved from using Java Cloud service SaaS Extension (JCS-SX) as a critical finance integration to using Oracle Visual Builder.
- Finally, they moved to Oracle Integration.
MVH decided to move to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing to improve both their organic and inorganic growth. Organic growth occurs when adding business units or banners to their Oracle Enterprise application usage, and inorganic growth occurs within the banners when adding hospitals on a monthly basis. So when they were looking at opportunities to improve their performance at the technology level, they found Autonomous Transaction Processing to be one of the best options. Autonomous Transaction Processing reduces some of the manual effort with database-as-a-service and provides several types of automation.
MVH did a proof of concept to help them decide if they wanted to move to this new technology, which took about three months. MVH moved 170+ integrations from legacy to the new technology, which took six months.
MVH got the following technical advantages during this deployment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:
- Performance: They monitored performance in areas such as finance with HCM and saw over 300% improvement from week one.
- They created a technology stack where they can leverage new technologies within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
MVH has plans for growth opportunities with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They want to add sizable business units in North America in the next 10–12 months and more PaaS or SaaS products from Oracle that are compatible with their existing technology investment.
Architecture
In this architecture, Mars Veterinary Health (MVH) moved from workloads using legacy technology to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure SaaS and PaaS solutions.
To enhance their performance and adapt to their growth, they opted for FastConnect for high bandwidth, Oracle Integration, Oracle Visual Builder, and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing.
MVH wants Autonomous Transaction Processing to be publicly accessible. Because the service is fully managed, Oracle takes care of the networking part: the virtual cloud network (VCN), subnets, availability domain, and fault domain. Oracle ensures that all environments, production, development, test, and user acceptance testing are highly available and fault tolerant.
Oracle Visual Builder and Oracle Integration are both managed services, which allows MVH to focus more on their business and their growth with no performance issue overhead.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
All the resources in this architecture are deployed in a single region.
- Availability domain
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.
- VCN and subnets
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
This architecture uses a single VCN, with separate subnets for the load balancer, web servers, application servers, and database.
- Internet gateway
The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
For fast and reliable connectivity from their on-premises network to Oracle Cloud, Alliance Data chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect.
- Route tables
Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
- Security lists
For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
- FastConnect
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect provides an easy way to create a dedicated, private connection between your data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.
- Identity Cloud Service (Do not use)
Oracle Identity Cloud Service provides identity management, single sign-on (SSO), and identity governance for a wide range of SaaS and on-premises applications.
- Oracle Services Network
The Oracle Services Network (OSN) is a conceptual network in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that is reserved for Oracle services. These services have public IP addresses that you can reach over the internet. Hosts outside Oracle Cloud can access the OSN privately by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect or VPN Connect. Hosts in your VCNs can access the OSN privately through a service gateway.
- Object storage
Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
- Autonomous Transaction
Processing
Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning gives you the power to adapt business models and processes quickly so you can reduce costs, sharpen forecasts, and innovate more.
- Human capital management (HCM)
Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management delivers the most complete human resources cloud solution on the market across Oracle HR, Talent Management, Workforce Management, and Oracle Payroll, unifying and automating processes to deliver end-to-end workforce visibility.
- Oracle SaaS
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a cloud-based software delivery model in which the cloud provider develops and maintains cloud application software, provides automatic software updates, and makes software available to its customers through the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. The cloud provider manages all the hardware, middleware, application software, and security. So SaaS customers can dramatically lower costs, deploy, scale, and upgrade business solutions more quickly than maintaining on-premises systems and software, and predict total cost of ownership with greater accuracy.
- Oracle PaaS
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a set of services to build and manage modern applications in the digital era whether on-premises or in the cloud.
PaaS delivers the infrastructure and middleware components that enable developers, IT administrators, and end users to build, integrate, migrate, deploy, secure, and manage mobile and web applications.
To aid productivity, PaaS offers ready-to-use programming components that allow developers to build new capabilities into their applications, including innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, blockchain, and internet of things (IoT). This group also includes suites of application development tools, including cloud native services, Kubernetes, Docker and container engines, and more.
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