AWS Case Study: Sogeti
About the Company
Sogeti has been providing IT consulting services since 1967. The company specializes in application and infrastructure management, in addition to quality assurance and testing, project management, and high-tech engineering services. Sogeti is globally headquartered in Paris, France. The company also has a North American headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. Sogeti’s growing network of 20,000 experts and professionals blankets more than 200 locations throughout the United States, Europe, and India.
The Business Challenges
As part of its effort to offer progressive, yet practical business solutions, Sogeti wanted to develop a unified, cost-effective disaster recovery plan for relational database management systems (RDBMS). In the event of a local disaster, the disaster recovery site needs to be physically separate from the primary environment, while still utilizing the same type of servers. The Oracle-certified secondary database must also be loosely coupled with the primary site, maintain synchronized data, and support multidirectional scalability to conform to shifting business demands.
Sogeti’s primary datacenter in Cincinnati, Ohio consists of a four node RAC (Real Application Cluster) hosted on a half rack Oracle Exadata machine.
Why Amazon Web Services
Faced with these stringent infrastructure requirements, Sogeti utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide cloud-based infrastructure for its DR plan, in conjunction with the Oracle Data Guard data replication mechanism. Sogeti’s clients can select from three options to meet their own business needs and budgets, ranging from three hours of daily backup to continuous backup with automated scripting capabilities.
After clients choose one of the DR plan options, Sogeti establishes an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance within the AWS US East (Northern Virginia) region. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are mounted to the Amazon EC2 instances for extra storage, as needed. The company establishes safe and reliable communication between the DR infrastructure and the primary database by leveraging AWS security capabilities.
Figure: Sogeti Oracle E-Business Suite Disaster Recovery Architecture
The Business Benefits
Today, Sogeti’s DR clients can schedule recovery exercises with less time and fewer resources than previously required. In the absence of complicated data validation and lengthy backups slowing down primary databases, clients are also finding it easier to comply with service-level agreements (SLAs).
Additionally, Sogeti and its clients are avoiding the extensive costs associated with secondary datacenters, such as hardware requisition, power supplies, and ongoing maintenance. Instead, DR budgets can be reallocated to cover more of the primary data environment. Ragesh Rao, Manager Database Services says, “With AWS, virtual servers can be quickly deployed with persistent storage and networking that leverages the Amazon EC2 service. You only pay for what you use, and there are no upfront costs or required long term commitments.”
To learn more, visit http://www.us.sogeti.com/ 
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Added December 28, 2011
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