Use Case: ExxonMobil — Oracle Exadata & Data Center Migration to AWS

Use Case  ·  Energy & Resources  ·  Oracle Exadata Migration

How ExxonMobil eliminated Oracle Exadata
and migrated its data center to AWS

One of the world's largest energy companies retired its costly Oracle Exadata infrastructure and migrated mission-critical databases and data center workloads to AWS — achieving dramatic cost reduction and a fully cloud-native data platform.

The challenge

ExxonMobil operated a significant Oracle Exadata estate — purpose-built engineered systems that, while performant, carry some of the highest total cost of ownership in enterprise infrastructure. Exadata licensing, maintenance, and hardware refresh cycles had become a substantial and inflexible cost center, with limited ability to scale elastically or adopt modern cloud-native capabilities.

Compounding this, the broader data center footprint supporting ExxonMobil’s upstream, downstream, and corporate workloads required modernization — presenting the opportunity to consolidate, migrate, and exit owned data center infrastructure entirely in a single coordinated program.

The imperative was clear: retire Oracle Exadata, migrate all associated databases to AWS, decommission the legacy data center, and do so without impacting the highly complex operational technology and business systems that run one of the world’s largest energy companies.

Client

ExxonMobil — one of the world’s largest publicly traded energy companies

Source platform

Oracle Exadata Oracle DB Enterprise On-premise data center

Target platform

Amazon RDS for Oracle Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Amazon Redshift AWS DMS AWS SCT

Industry

Energy & Resources — Upstream, Downstream & Corporate IT

Before & after — the Exadata cost problem

Oracle Exadata — the incumbent cost burden
✕Per-core Oracle licensing among the highest in enterprise software
✕Mandatory Exadata hardware maintenance contracts with Oracle
✕Fixed capacity — scale-up requires costly hardware refresh cycles
✕Data center colocation, power, cooling, and staffing costs
✕Limited elasticity and no pay-per-use model
AWS — the modernized outcome
✓Oracle licensing eliminated on replatformed Aurora PostgreSQL workloads
✓RDS managed service removes hardware and DBA maintenance overhead
✓Elastic scaling — right-size instances per workload in minutes
✓Data center fully decommissioned — zero facility costs
✓Reserved instances and Graviton optimized for long-term pricing

Migration approach

01

Rehost — Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle

Mission-critical databases with complex PL/SQL, Oracle-specific features, or constrained application timelines were migrated to Amazon RDS for Oracle — preserving full compatibility while immediately exiting Exadata hardware.

Fastest path to Exadata retirement with zero application changes

02

Replatform — Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL

Workloads suitable for open-source migration were converted using AWS SCT and custom remediation for Oracle-specific syntax, eliminating Oracle licensing entirely and achieving the greatest long-term TCO reduction.

Maximum cost savings — Oracle license cost fully eliminated per workload

03

Data Center Exit & Decommission

All Exadata nodes, supporting servers, storage arrays, and networking were systematically decommissioned in coordination with the AWS migration waves — enabling a full data center exit and elimination of facility costs.

Complete data center retirement — facility, power, and staffing costs eliminated

Near-zero downtime methodology

ExxonMobil’s operational systems run continuously across global energy production, refining, and trading operations. Each migration wave was engineered around a zero-unplanned-downtime standard:

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Oracle GoldenGate & AWS DMS

Oracle GoldenGate and AWS DMS Change Data Capture maintained real-time synchronization between Exadata source and AWS target throughout each migration window.

✓

Automated validation gates

Schema validation, row-count reconciliation, and full regression test suites required 100% pass before any production cutover could proceed.

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Wave-based cutovers

Databases grouped by criticality and dependency, with automated runbooks, rollback capability retained for 7 days, and a 72-hour hypercare war room post-cutover.

Results

Oracle Exadata fully decommissioned — hardware, licensing, and maintenance contracts eliminated
Complete data center exit — facility, power, cooling, and colocation costs retired
Oracle licensing eliminated on all replatformed Aurora PostgreSQL workloads
Near-zero downtime achieved across all migration waves — no critical production incidents
Elastic, cloud-native data platform enabling on-demand scaling across global operations

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