Optimizing global logistics
Blume Global is a leading provider of supply chain technology for execution and visibility, helping carriers, logistics firms and asset owners across 133 countries make their processes more agile, reliable and sustainable. With the most extensive network of any logistics technology provider, Blume combines direct connectivity to carriers with 27 years of industry data to help clients maximize the impact of transportation spend, improve customer service and reduce carbon emissions. The organization serves the entire industry, from small players right up to global giants such as Maersk, Kuehne+Nagel, Hapag-Lloyd, and Union Pacific.
Global supply chains have become increasingly complex, fragmented and timesensitive. Shipments typically pass through multiple touchpoints, partners, and transportation modes. These multiple redundant options translate into great resilience; if one link in the chain is unavailable, shipments can easily be rerouted through another. However, multiple links also make it extremely hard to maintain end-to-end visibility. And without visibility, it’s virtually impossible to optimize logistics processes.
Blume provides an open, neutral, real-time information platform for all trading partners to drive asset optimization, end-to-end traceability—and the allimportant visibility.
Tariq Suleman, AVP TechOps, at Blume Global, says: “We’re the digital glue in the supply chain, giving all partners the visibility they need. To increase the scalability and resilience of CarrierGo, one of our three key SaaS applications, we decided to move it to the cloud. This required us to find a fast, reliable and accurate way to move the large existing multi-tenant database to Google Cloud Platform.”
Fast and reliable data migration
Blume CarrierGo empowers trucking companies and their drivers to replace paper-based, manual processes for accepting and assigning loads, creating invoices and receiving payments. To make this logistics execution solution cloud-based, Blume faced the challenge of migrating a 1TB on-premises instance of Oracle Database.
“Given the large amount of data, the criticality of the application, and the fact that we had different database technologies on each side, manual migration was not a viable option,” says Suleman. “We wanted a robust, commercially developed and supported data streaming solution that was proven in the marketplace and that would ensure error-free migration. Striim fits the bill perfectly.”
Industry:
Logistics and Supply Chain
Technology
Region:
United States
Challenges:
Blume Global wanted to migrate its CarrierGo solution to the cloud to increase scalability and resilience but needed to ensure an accurate, timely, low-risk migration of its businesscritical database.
Solution:
Blume selected Striim Migration Service for Google Cloud to provide live streaming of data from the onpremises Oracle source to the MySQL target on Google Cloud Platform, minimizing disruption and risk.
Benefits:
Using Striim meant there was no need to stop its production database, so Blume was able to complete the migration quickly and accurately, without significant downtime or disruption for its tens of thousands of global users.
Rather than requiring a lift-and-shift operation on a shutdown database, Striim Migration Service for Google Cloud enabled Blume to set up continuous unidirectional streaming from its on-premises Oracle Database to a MySQL target running on a Google Compute Engine VM. This allowed the organization to manage the migration without downtime for the existing on-premises database and applications, with the ability to optimize and test the new cloud-based environment before switching over.
“Performance was one of our key requirements, as was data integrity,” says Suleman.
Robust, accurate, low-risk solution
Following an initial bulk load of data, Blume set up Striim to replicate live data to the cloud instance of MySQL, to keep it aligned with the on-premises Oracle production database. “For various internal reasons, we needed to stop and start the migration project, and Striim provided flexible licensing to minimize our costs,” says Suleman. “We have a relatively small IT team and budget, so that was extremely helpful.”
Now that the migration is complete, Blume is working to decommission and retire the source data center, which will produce significant long-term cost-savings. “Beyond reduced costs, the cloud migration enabled by Striim gives us access to all the other benefits of Google Cloud Platform. Compared with adding an on-premises instance of Oracle, it’s incredibly fast and simple to provision a new MySQL environment, or to scale up the existing platform by adding more virtual resources.”
The ability to keep the production database running throughout the migration significantly reduced the risk of disruption for Blume and its clients. “The user base for CarrierGo is truly global and spread across practically every time zone, and it would not have been practical to find a window of downtime for offline migration,” says Suleman. “With Striim, we got high performance and full data integrity in a robust, easy-to-use solution.”
Yamini Vellore, Chief Information Officer & Head of Customer Success, Blume Global, comments: “The complexity and sensitivity of global supply chains have never been more apparent. With assistance from partners such as Striim, Blume is able to deliver seamless visibility of global freight movements, helping our clients to keep the world in motion.”
Tariq Suleman - AVP TechOps, Blume Global
Take the next step
Striim’s enterprise-grade, streaming integration with intelligence platform makes it easy to build continuous, streaming data pipelines—including change data capture (CDC)—to power real-time cloud integration, log correlation, edge processing, and streaming analytics.
