Hi Community

I have a customer who currently has Exadata X5-2 and requires to migrate that platform to IBM Power servers with flash storage. He is currently using Oracle 11gR2 without RAC.
The customer has doubts about the compatibility and complexity to move these environments and what are the best practices to move from Exadata X5-2 with Oracle Linux Little Endian to IBM Power S1022 with AIX 7.2 Big Endian. 

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated

Migrating from Linux to AIX is a bit odd, they should migrate from X5-2 to Power Linux or even S390x Linux.

Not odd at all.  Oracle database is not available for Power Linux.  The customer may also have an existing AIX environment to utilise while not being a mainframe site.

Diego, listen to Nigel.

We've been running AIX/Oracle on Power for decades - through many upgrades - and by my experience, there are no other platform that out-performs Oracle on AIX on IBM Power.

We've consulted Niger in many'er occasions out of the goodness of his expert advice.

IBM Support on Oracle is legendary. They've been supporting the AIX/Oracle stack as if they were joint at the hip.

An should we say that Larry Ellison is being a bad boy again with ludicrous licensing ransom. Should I mention licensing Java?. Anyway migrating from Exadata to Power IBM is a good way to stick it to the Ludicrous.

"Jump in the water is fine..."

This is where a good Oracle DBA comes in.  The migration will need to be performed at the database level, there are tools for changing platforms that will deal with endianess differences.

Hi,

This is an excellent way to go.  IBM has a large practice that does this all the time.
The Exadata is expensing and limits function to just the database - you can't run your Oracle applications on ti and this is not a limit with Power Systems.

Moving to Power will involve either a database export and import or some tools to migrate the data live.

For those that do not know yet. Oracle does not run on Power running Linux - it is a comment mistake to assume it does. Common to Linux only people :-)

But it has Oracle on Power running AIX and has for decades. Actually, all the largest Oracle database are on Power and AIX.
There are other considerations moving to Power and AIX. Exadata is a managed service (at a high cost).
Either customer need to skill up system admin and DBA skills or get that done by IBM or IBM Business Partners which is comm these days.
So contact your local IBM representative as a IBM BP you must know who that is and ask for Oracle Exadata win-back support.
You should be able to save the customer loads of money (Power is likely to only need a quarter of the CPU core licences) and drastically improve their flexibility of co-hosting the Oracle RDMS and all those applications on to a low number of servers with load balancing.
Good luck, 

Hi Diego,

Oracle is only allowed to run on AIX on Power. (Oracle restriction). I have many Oracle on AIX clients at Shared Services Canada running on E1050s and E1080s.

Contact 

Erik Zedelmayer

Oracle on Power Sales Leader

IBM Americas Group

+1.760.705.8084

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Arnold Ness
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Oracle Data Pump would be my first choice.  You can also look at Database Migration Workbench that is part of Enterprise Manager and also RMAN Cross Platform restores.  We recently did the reverse to move data from AIX to Exadata as POC.  Not sure how the POC is going, but Data Pump managed to move it; can also look at using database links with Data Pump if desired.  We have been using Oracle database on AIX for +20 years, and hope that will continue another 20... 

Good to know that Oracle does not support Linux on POWER, I had not realized that.  Thought about trying it some day, but why would you want to if running AIX already?  :)

M.Wells

Hi, IBM Expert Labs - Systems has service offerings for migration from Exadata to Power. Please let know.

Sivakumar K T

Hello Diego, There are various options available for migrating a database from Exadata Linux to Power AIX using export/import, RMAN cross platform transportable tablespaces and cross platform incremental backups which will also do the endian conversion. The method depends on the database size and downtime requirements. We may also need some additional steps depending on the source database version, special data types, and if a database upgrade is needed as part of the migration. 

As Siva mentioned, our team in Expert Labs can help with a migration from Exadata to Power AIX. Slack me @Sujit if you need to have a discussion with the customer.