1. E-Business Suite Migration: from AIX to Exadata in 7 Months
Chris Martin & Ed Klein
Office of Financial Management,
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

2. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Background
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provides health coverage to more than 100 million people through Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Health Insurance Marketplace.
Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System (HIGLAS) is built on EBS R and standardizes the Federal financial accounting functions for all CMS’ programs.
Processes roughly $1.5 trillion in payments per year
Approximately 5 million claims per day

3. Challenges
‘If you were faced with these requirements to transition your Oracle EBS from a legacy platform to Exadata within seven months, what would you do?’
Migrate 98TB of program data, including 35TB of production financial transactions, over a three day weekend
Reconcile ~$1.5 Trillion and 46 Billion transactions, for 29 organizations
Migrate 23 Applications, including Oracle EBS, OBIEE Data Warehouse, and tools
Create 17 Non-production environments

4. Challenges
Data Center Migration:
Procure and install new infrastructure for a Production data center and a Disaster Recovery data center to be ready Day 1
Assess 144 security controls and obtain Security Officer authorization to operate in the new environment
Manage two separate contractor operation teams, one supporting the legacy environment and another building the new environment
Transition Operating Systems from AIX to Linux
All While Continuing to Provide Production Operations Support, including the CFO Financial and IT Audit

5. It Can Be Done! Migration in 7 Months
OFM successfully resolved significant functional, technical and transition challenges – some unique to CMS and others applicable to all organizations – while continuing to maintain a high availability and complex production environment during our transition.
Be successful even when confronted with the most complex requirements
Maintain high availability for mission critical financial systems and business operations
Achieve efficiencies and reduce overall operational risks
It Can Be Done!

6. EBS Transition Approach
Used Risk-based approach with the following areas of focus:
Data Migration and Validation
Application Validation and Performance Testing
Network Access and Stakeholder Coordination
Operational Readiness
Security Readiness

7. Data Migration Validation Tasks
Physically moved Financial & Program Data to new Datacenters & Migrated Data from AIX to Linux
Constraint was our migration and validation timeline schedule
Performed validations for all rows of data at the database level as part of migration
After the validation, standard financial reports were executed to reconcile before and after
This was performed during the mock migrations as well as the final migration

8. Validation & Performance Testing
The Exadata platform provided improved performance however select programs and reports initially ran slowly
This was mitigated by identifying critical and frequently executed programs, i.e. batch, and focusing on batch performance testing/tuning
Worked with stakeholders to test connectivity for interactive users and file transfers
Utilized the same application experts for technical/development and functional support while hosting and helpdesk functions were migrated from the incumbent
Due to our efforts in this area, there were no significant issues around performance after go-live

9. How Did We Overcome Our Challenges?
People, Processes & Systems
Identifying the right people; staff and contractors
On & Off-Site System Experts
Clearly Defined: Team Roles and Responsibilities
Flexibility, Transparency & Willingness to Change Course
Based on Timely Information and Experience
People
Elements for
Success
Systems
Processes