Moving operations to the cloud sounds appealing on so many levels: Cut capital expenditures, reduce deployment times and pay only for what you use. But the devil is in the details.

That’s what confronted Exar Corp., a Fremont, CA-based supplier of analog mixed-signal products serving the industrial, high-end consumer and infrastructure markets, when it chose to move the Oracle applications it uses for order management, shipping, finance and shop floor management to the Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The problem was that Exar’s Oracle stack wasn’t natively supported by AWS. It’s a six-year-old bundle running on a non-standard Oracle Linux 32-bit server that wouldn’t import cleanly to a 64-bit platform on Amazon. Time is of the essence in Exar’s business. The company wanted to upgrade to the latest version of Oracle, but doing so on premise would have taken months.

“If we went the standard upgrade route, we would have needed to acquire additional equipment, which takes three to four weeks. Then troubleshooting the migration takes another two weeks,” said Renato Siljeg, vice president of information technology at Exar. “I didn’t have enough time on my hands to do this.”

The company went looking for a cloud migration service to conduct a test run using a duplicate version of its Oracle stack. It settled on a hybrid cloud model from CloudVelox Inc. that migrates existing applications into the public cloud with little or no modification. In addition to handling complex, multi-tier environments, CloudVelox extends AWS’s security to enterprise data stored on-premise to give its customers the ability to run their existing and new Linux and Windows multi-tier and multi-system apps without modification on the AWS cloud.

Exar’s top priorities for the project were to improve disaster recovery service-level agreements, speed information flow and virtualize as much as possible to minimize on-premise data center costs and take advantage of AWS’s pay-as-you-go economics. Its environment had a number of unique characteristics, though. It used some libraries that the AWS platform lacked, as well as a hybrid storage environment encompassing both solid-state and disk storage.

But with CloudVelox’s automation, “We were able to migrate and replicate Oracle infrastructure without issue,” Siljeg said. CloudVelox was even able to recognize and emulate the unusual storage setup automatically. “From a user perspective, everything is transparent. I was surprised,” Siljeg said.

Such time savings aren’t unusual when automation is applied, said Gregory Ness, vice president of worldwide marketing at CloudVelox. “We have an application blueprint approach that, aside from identifying the workloads, automates a lot of the processes via APIs,” he said. “Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the migration can be automated. We were at about 75 percent in Exar’s case.”

Result: Instead of eight weeks, the migration was accomplished in two. Siljeg estimates that AWS’s flexible pricing will more than halve operational expenses. Equally important, the company will be able to move disaster recovery from a co-located data center in Sacramento to AWS, saving between $250,000 and $400,000 each year in real estate and equipment costs. Recovery times will be slashed from two days to one hour.

As Exar prepares to migrate its production Oracle environment to the cloud, Siljeg is already looking ahead at moving some of its design and test applications to AWS. The company will have the ability to provision cloud environments three times faster than it could on premise, an important competitive tool in a time-sensitive industry. “If we can cut time-to-delivery from four to two weeks, it’s a huge advantage,” Siljeg said.

It turns out migration wasn’t so painful after all. “We were surprised at how CloudVelox was able to mimic what we have on premise in the cloud,” Seljig said. “They figured it out in one day.”