Light-Speed Performance
Continued
“Until recently, though, the primary challenge that prevented most telecommunications companies and network operators from unlocking the intelligence within their CDRs was the sheer volume of data—billions of records and hundreds of terabytes of storage—and the costs associated with managing that data,” says LGR’s Hartley.
At one of LGR’s largest customer sites, maintaining data on more than 75 million subscribers requires two 310-terabyte solutions loading an average of 3 billion new records a day (about 35,000 per second) and about 1.2 petabytes of raw storage. This places it among the world’s foremost data warehouse installations, and one that the customer reports has delivered more than 500 percent return on investment (ROI) to date. “We see Oracle Exadata as a perfect platform to scale and absorb this growth,” says Salmon. “It’s a plug-and-play system: plug in more discs, and the system just uses those discs. You don’t have to reconfigure anything.” That functionality is important. “This tremendous speed and capacity translates into money in the bank for our customers,” Salmon says, “since it enables them to establish one source of CDR data to feed multiple business units.”
“In the past, our customers were already able to get business intelligence with our solution that they weren’t able to get anywhere else,” says LGR’s van Rooyen. “Now we’re able to offer our customers two options for their data warehouse architecture—a custom-built data warehouse platform or the Oracle Exadata solution. With Oracle Exadata, we can provide everything in one easy box.”
As part of its beta testing, LGR used the same terabyte database to run an apples-to-apples comparison between Oracle Exadata and one of its production systems running HP Superdomes. “In our empirical test, the little Oracle Exadata box with less than 100 spindles dramatically beat out our production system with more than 1,000 spindles, which was a real David and Goliath event,” says van Rooyen. “So far we’ve observed up to an 89 percent increase in performance in certain areas. While that kind of improvement won’t happen across the board, Oracle Exadata provides a quantum leap in terms of a different approach to database design. For example, there’s such a high increase in performance on certain types of queries that it becomes possible to do away with index maintenance. In data warehouse environments, that impact can be massive.”
From LGR’s perspective, that type of performance means only one thing: There’s no limit on Oracle’s (and LGR’s) ability to scale solutions for future needs. “You can now get Oracle for very, very large production systems with guaranteed performance,” says van Rooyen. “It’s a powerful message. It’s future-proof Oracle.”
Putting the Focus on Business Benefits
Extreme performance isn’t the only benefit of Oracle Exadata. From LGR’s perspective, Oracle Exadata has the potential to eliminate architectural discussions, encouraging organizations to focus on addressing business needs rather than IT infrastructure. In the past, Hartley has seen customers spend 6, 12, or even 18 months defining and redefining their data warehouse architecture to build it for scalability and redundancy. “Now they don’t have to do that,” he says. “Oracle Exadata changes the discussion from, 'How am I going to configure this technology stack?’ to the more-strategic discussion of, 'How can I use this solution to immediately drive benefits across my business?’ Once we eliminate that technological/IT debate, we’re able to get to the business benefits much faster.”
