Enkitec Case Study Developing a Database as a Service Platform for a Global Financial Institution. A key client of Enkitec’s is a global financial services firm (The Bank) with administrative operations in New York, NY, and Canary Wharf, London. This organization provides high value solutions to its clients in the following markets: consumer banking, corporate banking, credit cards, finance and insurance, foreign currency exchange, investment banking, mortgage loans, private banking, private equity and, wealth management. The firm’s major operating platform consists of locations throughout the world including the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, India, with significant presence in numerous additional locations across the globe. The Bank’s IT infrastructure was inefficient, costly and lacked the scalability to easily accommodate the company’s rapid data growth requirements, which stem from the continual onboarding of new customers and information input by its existing client base. Frequent system outages, high IT and labor costs were a result of these issues, diminishing internal client confidence. To address the above issues, The Bank sought to upgrade its systems for enhanced performance, availability and scalability in a cost effective way. In 2012, they chose to migrate their Oracle Databases from their existing server and storage platforms to Oracle® Exadata Database Machine X3-2. The Mission of the migration to Exadata was to provide a highly resilient and scalable Oracle RAC database service for mixed load demands to internal bank customers meeting the following criteria: • • • • • Tier 1 application requiring a dedicate Oracle RAC 11g R2 Database solution Requirement for “Highest” or “High” resiliency options as defined in The Bank’s Database Resiliency best practices Requires guaranteed I/O performance at storage capacity between 15TB and 150TB. Compliant with bi-annual patching, mandatory Database upgrades, and maintenance windows Business case clearly demonstrates the benefits of Exadata technology proven by POC (i.e. I/O performance requirements that can be uniquely met by Exadata technology) Results In response to The Bank’s requirements, Enkitec developed a blueprint and data strategy to overcome the scalability, availability, and performance challenges with its current Database as a service (DBaaS) model. The Enkitec plan focused on closing gaps in the current tactical solution by providing an on-site Oracle team (6-12 months) • Create and publish an internal model to support Exadata • Address the insufficient release management resources • Provide 24x7x365 support demanded by all Tier 1 applications • Engineering and Support are run as single effort • Assume end-to-end ownership of the Oracle technical stack • Improve deployment efficiency and documentation to reduce redundant effort Develop scalable and sustainable strategic support model for Exadata (12 months) • Build internal Exadata support organization • Develop change control and governance model around Engineered Systems • Take over support role from the current on-site team Ensure complete knowledge transfer to Exadata Solution Owner organization (12+ months) • Engineering • Deployment • Support Enkitec’s Support model covered the full life-cycle of implementing The Bank’s newly developed DBaaS platform. The model described below illustrates the lifecycle of services provided. The new Exadata solution provides the critical scalability The Bank requires to accommodate planned (and unplanned) growth in their business, making it easier, faster and more cost effective to onboard new customers and maintain a high level of performance and availability for their existing clients. Exadata has also enabled THE BANK to dramatically simplify and consolidate its IT infrastructure to achieve a lower TCO across the board. With Exadata, for example, the company no longer requires a separate reporting system and now provides real-time reporting capabilities to their customer base while eliminating additional hardware, software, and maintenance/management costs. The benefits included: • • • • Enabled improvement of overall system performance. Enhanced system availability with built-in redundancy. Fostered systems expansion to support customer growth as needed. Streamlined support for OLTP systems with one integrated database machine. • • • Eliminated the need for many of anticipated IT investments, including development of a separate reporting system. Eliminated several planned purchases of additional software and hardware add-on/expansion solutions, including SAN upgrades and thirdparty DR services. Provided measurable datacenter efficiencies (by consolidating and simplifying the infrastructure) to reduce upgrade costs, licensing fees and ongoing maintenance/management expenses. With Enkitec’s influence THE BANK plans to implement over 30+ Exadata systems within the next 12 months to support the DBaaS platform across the globe.