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Leading commercial silica producer accelerated its JD Edwards ERP reporting performance by 10x, while adding resilient cloud disaster recovery on Platform Equinix® with Oracle, BIAS and Datatility

Business overviewU.S. Silica Holdings, Inc. is a leading producer of commercial silica and diatomaceous earth used in a wide range of industrial applications and in the oil and gas industry. Over its 119-year history, U.S. Silica has developed core competencies in mining, processing, logistics and materials science to cost-effectively produce and deliver over 1,500 diversified products to customers across a variety of markets. The company has experienced significant expansion, including the merger and acquisition (M&A) of a number of sand and mineral businesses.

Business challenge U.S. Silica wanted to increase the performance, scalability and resiliency of its internal business processes, based on Oracle’s JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. The firm’s legacy on-premises infrastructure was placing significant limitations on its company-wide ERP environment and hindering the IT team’s ability to easily upgrade it and leverage new capabilities. U.S. Silica also needed a dedicated disaster recovery (DR) solution to maintain business continuity in the event of a disaster. The firm turned to Oracle and its Oracle system integrator, BIAS, who partnered with Equinix and Datatility to create a redundant, interconnected cloud infrastructure for U.S. Silica, which resulted in greater application and data performance, scalability and DR.

About U.S. SilicaU.S. Silica Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SLCA) is a global, publicly held performance materials company and last-mile logistics provider. The company is a leading producer of commercial silica and diatomaceous earth used in a wide range of industrial applications and in the oil and gas industry.

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About BIASAs an Oracle Specialized Platinum Partner, Certified Oracle Reseller and Systems Integrator, BIAS provides exceptional business and IT expertise and delivers advanced solutions to customers in both the commercial and public sectors.

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About DatatilityDatatility was founded on the principle of providing its customers with key service solutions including networking, managed colocation, private cloud storage, network design, disaster recovery and backup, hybrid cloud and network performance hubs.

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Case StudyHybrid Cloud

Supercharging reliable enterprise resource planning on Oracle® cloud infrastructure

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SolutionU.S. Silica’s rapid growth and expansion through M&A provided compelling reasons to move its on-premises JD Edwards ERP platform and Oracle database systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for greater performance and scalability. At the same time, upgrading its JD Edwards ERP environment across the entire organization would streamline and automate many of its business processes. And building a remote, cloud-based and high-availability DR infrastructure would allow the company to quickly restore operations in the event of a system or power failure.

To help U.S. Silica successfully accomplish its business process and performance objectives, BIAS—in partnership with Equinix and managed service provider Datatility—created a high-performance, secure and reliable interconnected, multiregion hybrid cloud infrastructure on Platform Equinix.

BIAS played a critical role in implementing U.S. Silica’s new hybrid IT infrastructure. The firm manages U.S. Silica’s production, nonproduction and DR environments for its Oracle applications and technologies. This includes JD Edwards, Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Oracle Cloud, Oracle Database Cloud Service and Active Data Guard between primary and secondary DR locations. Recognizing the need for secure, high-performing network access to the ERP application and data, BIAS turned to Datatility to architect and implement the necessary network services.

Together, BIAS, Equinix and Datatility deployed U.S. Silica’s hybrid cloud and DR interconnection infrastructure in an Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center in Ashburn, VA (Eastern region). The team also deployed a DR implementation in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Phoenix data center connected via the Equinix Los Angeles IBX data center (Western region). By leveraging OCI FastConnect and Equinix Fabric™ between the two regions, the solution accelerated the provisioning of high-speed, low-latency virtual connections to Oracle Cloud at a substantially reduced cost to U.S. Silica. It also enabled Datatility to provision the connectivity to U.S. Silica’s cloud-based DR environment in Phoenix within a couple of hours.

U.S. Silica’s JD Edwards and Oracle Cloud Deployment on Platform Equinix

Ashburn Region Primary - JD EdwardsOn-premises

PLATFORM EQUINIX®

ASHBURN IBX® Data Center

Phoenix Region Backup - JD Edwards

LOS ANGELES IBX® Data Center

WAN Network

Remote Site

Remote Site

HQ Data CenterOCI FastConnect

OCI FastConnect

EquinixFabric™

EquinixFabric™

Managed services provided by BIAS.

About Oracle CloudOracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications, platform services and engineered systems. With more than 420,000 customers in more than 145 countries, Oracle provides a complete technology stack both in the cloud and in the data center.

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About Equinix Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company™. Digital leaders harness our trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success.

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Hybrid Cloud Case Study 2

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Datatility is also an expert Equinix Fabric reseller partner. Its comprehensive managed services, on top of the direct and secure software-defined interconnection of Equinix Fabric, expedited the connection of U.S. Silica’s hybrid cloud and DR infrastructure across multiple IBX facilities and instances of Oracle Cloud on Platform Equinix.

Datatility teamed up with SummitIG to deploy high-speed direct connects between the Equinix IBX and U.S. Silica’s enterprise data center using 10 GB dark fiber, and used 1 GB fiber to connect to Oracle Cloud via OCI FastConnect and Equinix Fabric. This enabled Datatility to quickly establish high-speed, low-latency connections between U.S. Silica’s ERP applications and databases on its legacy IT infrastructure to Oracle Cloud for fast application and data migration. For example, the initial network connections for U.S. Silica took Datatility only 72 hours to establish, versus 60 to 120 days. And from there, setting up the connections to Oracle Cloud between the eastern and western data centers and the DR site took just a few hours.

“Once we had that initial connection up on Equinix Fabric, we could provision U.S. Silica to any Oracle Cloud instance within under an hour. That’s why we love Equinix,” said James Tansey, CEO of Datatility.

High-performance, secure and reliable networking and cloud interconnection greatly accelerated the ability of BIAS to efficiently and cost-effectively implement U.S. Silica’s JD Edwards ERP upgrade and migration to Oracle Cloud, as well as other Oracle and non-Oracle application migrations. BIAS also mastered the complex challenges inherent in moving U.S. Silica’s complex on-premises Oracle ERP and database environment to the cloud. For example, BIAS was able to ensure interoperability between JD Edwards and many Oracle and non-Oracle systems, testing both internal and external systems, and identifying and resolving issues. It also successfully integrated on-premises and cloud applications, as well as hundreds of business partner sensors and kiosks at distribution centers that exchange data with JD Edwards.

“All aspects of the integration, regression, performance, quality assurance and user acceptance testing to ensure the upgrade and migration of JD Edwards to Oracle Cloud were 100% + successful,” said Hasan Zaidi, Partner and Vice President for Middleware Technology and Security, BIAS.

“Our internal business operations teams have seen a significant improvement in performance in everything and anything—from finance to logistics to transportation.”Mohammed Shareef, Director, IT Applications and Enterprise Architecture, U.S. Silica

Benefits Faster reporting10x improvement in monthly financial reporting runtime, from hours to minutes

Dynamic data supportIncreased network scalability and storage capacity to support an anticipated doubling of data backup volume

Quicker provisioningVia virtual connections to Oracle Cloud and DR sites in hours instead of weeks

Reduced CAPEXWith JD Edwards and Oracle database migration to Oracle Cloud

Improved DR timeAn estimated three-hour disaster recovery time, a more than 85% improvement

Hybrid Cloud Case Study 3

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Value realizedU.S. Silica immediately saw the benefits of the flawless migration of its JD Edwards environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Its monthly financial reporting performance improved dramatically, delivering benefits to other parts of the business as well. The company was also able to significantly reduce its CAPEX footprint by retiring or repurposing some of its legacy application and database hardware and virtual machines. And being on more scalable and reliable service-based cloud and automated ERP platforms allowed both U.S. Silica and BIAS to focus their attention on new application development and DevOps projects.

In addition to creating a higher performance and more scalable and resilient ERP and business operations environment, U.S. Silica anticipates its interconnected hybrid cloud infrastructure will help it continue to grow and onboard new companies through M&A.

The benefits gained by U.S. Silica and its internal users include:

§ Accelerated the migration of JD Edwards ERP and database platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using high-speed, low-latency private interconnection.

§ Gained a tenfold performance improvement in 90% of its ERP monthly financial reporting, going from hours to minutes.

§ Dramatically reduced CAPEX overhead and increased access to scalable, subscription-based Oracle Cloud resources on demand.

§ Increased storage scalability, which is critical, as the company anticipates it will more than double data capacity from 50 GB to over 1 TB in the next two to three years.

§ Achieved a fast cloud interconnection via Equinix Fabric in hours instead of weeks.

§ Demonstrated the new DR environment’s ability to recover in under three hours in preproduction testing, using Active Data Guard to replicate between primary and DR locations with real-time synchronization.

“Partnering with BIAS, Equinix and Datatility to migrate our JD Edwards ERP platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has made it lightning fast, accelerating our monthly reporting tenfold, while enhancing the resiliency of our entire business.”Mohammed Shareef, Director, IT Applications and Enterprise Architecture, U.S. Silica

Get startedTo learn more or begin creating a similar solution for your business, contact our team today.

Hybrid Cloud Case Study 4