Fortune 250 Transportation Giant Halves Infrastructure Costs While Modernizing 500+ Databases

The Company

This Fortune 250 transportation company is one of the largest freight railroad operators in the United States. With annual revenues exceeding $14 billion, the company runs a vast rail network that moves essential goods across the country. They play a critical role in the U.S. supply chain, ensuring that industries and consumers receive vital products on time.

To keep operations running smoothly, the organization relies on a large fleet of Oracle databases powering mission-critical applications - from scheduling trains and optimizing routes to managing logistics platforms and customer services. These systems must be reliable, highly available, and scalable to support the demands of real-time scheduling, shipment tracking, and customer interactions.

For this railroad operator, even a brief disruption in its core IT systems can have far-reaching consequences — from delayed trains and disrupted shipments to lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience; it directly impacts business operations and the broader economy.

The Challenge

As part of a company-wide transformation under a new CIO and CEO, the organization set a two-year mandate to exit its data centers and move all critical workloads to Microsoft Azure.

However, the Oracle environment presented unique challenges:

• No native Oracle PaaS on Azure initially led to consideration of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
  
  
• Cross-cloud latency between Azure-hosted apps and OCI-hosted databases degraded performance.
  
  
• A one-database-per-server model caused underutilization and operational inefficiency.
  
  
• Traditional RAC complexity added administrative overhead and slowed scalability.

The company needed a unified platform that could modernize its Oracle databases on Azure, simplify operations, and deliver enterprise-grade performance — all while staying compliant and cloud-native.

The Tessell Approach

Tessell partnered with the customer to deliver a cloud-native, enterprise-grade data platform purpose-built for modernizing and managing Oracle workloads on Azure.

1. Enabling Cloud Adoption on Azure

The data center exit hinged on moving all applications and databases into Azure. Tessell bridged a critical technology gap by offering a fully managed Oracle PaaS experience natively on Azure, allowing the customer to:

• Keep databases co-located with applications, eliminating cross-cloud latency.
  
  
• Operate Oracle databases natively on Azure, with seamless integration into Azure networking, security, and monitoring.
  
  
• Accelerate cloud transformation by maintaining parity with Azure-native services like provisioning, scaling, and automation.

This approach allowed the organizaiton to standardize its entire application and data stack within Azure, meeting both business and technical goals.

2. Building a Future-Ready Data Platform

With Tessell, the customer moved from a fragmented, server-bound model to a modernized data platform that optimizes resources, boosts performance, and simplifies governance.

• Intelligent consolidation enabled multiple databases to run securely on shared servers, improving infrastructure utilization.
  
  
• High availability and disaster recovery were built into the platform using Oracle Data Guard, achieving RPO/RTO parity with RAC while simplifying operations.
  
  
• Unified observability and governance gave real-time visibility into performance, compliance, and utilization across its fleet.

This architecture provided a foundation for long-term data management and modernization and not just a lift-and-shift.

3. Automation-Driven Operations

Tessell’s automation-first platform transformed database management from a manual, server-intensive process into a seamless, self-service experience:

• 10x faster provisioning (6–8 hours → under 30 minutes) with automated workflows.
  
  
• Hands-free patching, backups, and monitoring, reducing manual overhead and human error.
  
  
• Self-service capabilities empowered DBAs to deploy and scale databases quickly and consistently.

These advancements freed up the database teams to focus on strategic initiatives, innovation, and optimization rather than day-to-day maintenance.

The Migration Journey

Migrating 500+ databases - many mission-critical - was a significant undertaking. Tessell and the customer executed a phased, automation-led plan designed for speed, stability, and confidence:

• Comprehensive assessment of the Oracle landscape to guide architecture and sizing.
  
  
• Phased cutovers starting with non-production workloads, validating performance before production.
  
  
• Automation-led execution, using Tessell’s platform for provisioning, monitoring, and switchover.
  
  
• Dedicated support from a joint team, ensuring 24×7 coverage and knowledge transfer.

The result was a smooth, low-risk migration, completed on schedule enabling the customer to immediately benefit from Tessell’s platform capabilities.

Results & Impact

With Tessell, the organization built a modern, efficient, and resilient Oracle platform on Azure:

• 40% lower infrastructure costs through intelligent consolidation and right-sizing
  
  
• 4x improvement in server utilization (15% → 60%)
  
  
• 10x faster provisioning with automation across database lifecycle tasks
  
  
• Simplified management through unified observability and automation
  
  
• Enterprise-grade resilience with built-in HA and DR
  
  
• Improved DBA productivity and faster response to business needs
  
  

Today, the organization operates a streamlined, cloud-native data environment that’s fully aligned with its operational priorities - speed, resilience, and cost efficiency.

Looking Ahead

With its Oracle environment modernized and consolidated on Tessell, the company has built a stronger foundation for the future - scaling IT resources more efficiently, responding faster to business needs, and reducing operational risks.

Looking ahead, the customer continues to deepen its partnership with Tessell, investing in new capabilities such as the Data Ecosystem, integrated with Microsoft Fabric. These innovations will help unify operational and analytical data, drive real-time insights, and further strengthen the resilience and efficiency of rail operations.

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