NBN Co was created on 9 April, 2009 with the goal to deliver Australia’s first national wholesale only, open access broadband network to all Australians. In 2012 Fusion Professionals were entrusted to implement and integrate Oracle Exadata into NBNCo’s core business systems.
Objectives
Fusion Professionals were tasked with facilitating NBNCo in the reduction of their IT infrastructure and system licensing costs, with a direct focus on moving to the Exadata platform. The NBNCo systems in scope for the project comprised of the following elements:
Eight separate Oracle clusters on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
286 databases (94 Production DBs, 192 PSUP and End-to-End DBs) and
Shared storage layer on VMAX.
NBNCo’s existing disparate solution had experienced three years of system and data growth; as a consequence, it was beginning to show signs of its capacity limitations. With NBNCo’s large Oracle footprint and the requirement for mixed database workloads (both OLTP and Datawarehouse) Fusion Professionals recommended Exadata as a natural progression.
Solution
Leading the delivery of Phase One, Fusion Professionals strong relationship with NBNCo enabled the project to be established swiftly. The system design consisted of four Exadata Half Rack installations, two in each datacenter to maintain disaster recovery requirements. Once installed all system integration was verified via thorough high availability and performance testing and the entire deployment was completed well on time in under three months. As part of phase one, 108 individual databases were identified for Exadata migration. Fusion Professionals designed and developed procedures for each migration based on specific product or customer demands and all were completed in less than five months. Heralded as a success, three months later phase two was commissioned. Fusion Professionals began implementing four Full Rack Upgrades, finishing in just two Months, providing NBNCo the capacity to migrate all their production and end-to-end test databases. A further 178 databases migrations were achieved in under seven months resulting in the decommissioning of the old UCS clusters and the repurposing of liberated storage.
Best for Exadata
Fusion Professionals has rich experience in the database technologies and services required for Oracle Exadata and have successfully delivered numerous Exadata projects. By leveraging the collaboration between Oracle and Fusion Professionals you’ll get a robust and rapid solution delivery to maximise the return on your Exadata investment. Reduce implementation risk by leveraging our proven transition methodology, experience and management services.
Technical Benefits
Fusion Professionals successful execution of the Exadata project vastly alleviated performance and space issues on the existing shared storage solution. The benefits continued with the new Exadata storage. Features like smart scan & storage indexes interpreting into visible performance improvements for the applications. The benchmark tests revealed on average four times faster transactions and queries.
In terms of future proofing the platform, capacity was provided for the next three years with the option of expanding the system if necessary or with the Hybrid Columnar compression feature, the ability for online archiving affording the potential for an even longer outlook.
Business Benefits
The business prospered from Fusion Professionals timely delivery as the Exadata system consolidation reduced all Oracle related support and licensing costs by moving them under one domain. Furthermore the new systems maintenance tasks were moved into the scope of the DBA team, effectively producing human resource savings by reducing the reliance on operational engineers for activities such as disk failures.
“Over the last 4 years Fusion Professionals have done a great job supporting the evolution of our database environment. Their expertise and professionalism in the Exadata implementation and database migration project has made it a great success“.
Gordon Macmillan General Manager IT Infrastructure & Service Management NBN Co Limited
Achievements
Fusion Professionals integrated four Exadata Full Racks into NBNCo systems.
Fusion Professionals conducted Performance & High Availability Testing for eight RAC Exadata Clusters.
Fusion Professionals designed, tested and accomplished 286 live database migrations without any service impact.
Fusion Professionals rebuilt the Dataguard solutions onto the Exadata Platform.
