Case Study: Dell Inc. achieves migration downtime cut from 20 hours to 40 minutes with Quest SharePlex

Minimizing Downtime During Database Migration

Dell migrated its mission‑critical Delta system — a 9 TB Oracle database supporting 20,000 users and sales to 40 million customers — to modern Dell infrastructure and Oracle 11gR2 to address aging hardware, poor peak‑time performance and unacceptable planned downtime. A manual rebuild would have taken weeks and caused about 20 hours of cutover downtime, so the IT team needed a low‑risk way to upgrade with minimal business disruption.

Dell deployed Quest SharePlex for near‑real‑time replication to sync the old and new databases while testing, alongside new PowerEdge servers, EqualLogic storage and upgraded networking. The move reduced migration downtime from 20 hours to 40 minutes, enabled a seven‑week preproduction test cycle, purged 1.2 TB of obsolete data (cutting storage costs by up to a third), delivered up to 40% IT time savings, boosted response performance dramatically (page loads from ~15 seconds to fractions of a second / ~158% improvement) and increased end‑user productivity with no reported post‑migration faults.

Dell Inc.

Sunil Nookala

Senior IT Manager