Auxilium Pharmaceuticals Ensures High Availability, Improves Performance, and Targets Substantial Savings with Database Appliance
 
 

Auxilium Pharmaceuticals Ensures High Availability, Improves Performance, and Targets Substantial Savings with Database Appliance

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Auxilium is a specialty biopharmaceutical company with a focus on developing and marketing products used predominantly by specialists. Its mission is to improve lives of patients throughout the world by successfully identifying, developing, and commercializing innovative specialty biopharmaceutical products. Auxilium is committed to the long-term success of its employees and shareholders, providing new options to healthcare professionals, and the welfare of patients.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

  • “Moving forward, we cannot imagine operating a clustered database environment without Oracle Database Appliance. It gives us the high performance we need and is easy-to-deploy and maintain.” – David Weiss, Senior Database Administrator, Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

  • Ensure a highly available data infrastructure for business-critical applications, such as clinical databases, as well as laboratory, manufacturing, quality control, learning management, and sales systems
  • Gain the ability to rapidly and cost-effectively build a clustered database environment
  • Streamline system validation to meet US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements for IT environments used in pharmaceutical manufacturing
  • Reduce IT capital expenses and management costs, including avoidance of purchasing excess core processing capacity to scale in the future

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed four Oracle Database Appliances to create high-performance and highly reliable database clusters that support many business-critical systems, including quality-control databases and laboratory and manufacturing systems
  • Accelerated compliance with FDA validation requirements, compared to using commodity-based hardware solutions that do not provide configuration scripts
  • Reduced IT costs with pay-as-you-grow licensing that eliminated purchasing more core processors than the company required
  • Cut by 20% to 30% the time spent applying system patches, by eliminating the need for one-off patching
  • Created a clustered database environment with two nodes in just two days with Oracle Database Appliance, significantly faster than when the company built its own cluster environment
  • Used Oracle Data Guard to ensure higher availability, data protection, and disaster recovery―avoiding even a single unscheduled outage eight months after go live
  • Gained the ability to dynamically switch to another node or Oracle Data Guard environment to apply rolling patches, avoiding down time
  • Deployed Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to effectively and efficiently manage Oracle Database Appliance, gaining visibility into 95% of the environment, down to the Oracle Automatic Storage Management architecture

Why Oracle

“We first learned about Oracle Database Appliance at Oracle OpenWorld and then heard of it again through our implementation partner Mythics. What set it apart is its ability to manage concurrent activities without compromising performance,” said David Weiss, senior database administrator, Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. “In addition, we were going to an Oracle Real Application Clusters environment from another Oracle solution, which was much easier than if we had switched to an IBM platform. We would have had to retool the architecture, reporting, and data loading processes, a hefty undertaking. We made the right choice. Management was so pleased with the first two units that it approved adding additional Oracle Database Appliances to our environment.”

Implementation Process

Auxilium was the first company in Pennsylvania to deploy Oracle Database Appliance. It took delivery of two Oracle Database Appliance units in February 2012, created the test environment in March 2012, and completed validation and went live in May 2012.

Mythics led the implementation process in terms of providing training, as well as scripts to accelerate deployment. In addition, Auxilium worked closely with Oracle to resolve minor configuration issues quickly. “The level of support that Oracle provided was outstanding,” Weiss said.

Partner

Auxilium chose Oracle Specialized Partner Mythics as its implementation partner after seeing the company present at Oracle’s Philadelphia offices and then traveling to its technology lab for a comprehensive demonstration. Mythics helped Auxilium to deploy the solution, providing prebuilt installation scripts to accelerate validation and go live. It also provided extensive training, which the Auxilium team extended through an engagement with Oracle University.
 

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