IRCE Lowers Database Maintenance Costs by 100% with a Highly Dependable System, Standardizes and Unifies Data Processing
 
 

IRCE Lowers Database Maintenance Costs by 100% with a Highly Dependable System, Standardizes and Unifies Data Processing

  • Oracle Customer:  IRCE
    Location:  Imola, Italy
    Industry:  Industrial Manufacturing
    Employees:  1,000
    Annual Revenue:  $500 Million to $1 Billion

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IRCE manufactures windings (enamelled wires) for electrical machines, and insulated cables used for conveying energy. The company operates three plants in Italy—at Imola, Guglionesi, and Umbertide. It also has two subsidiaries in the Netherlands and England. IRCE has been listed on stock exchanges since 1996.

To make manufacturing processes more efficient, IRCE wanted to update its use of Oracle Enterprise One (Standard Edition). In addition, it needed to update an inadequate, obsolete, and disparate data infrastructure, based on Microsoft server clusters with different databases operating on multiple platforms, all which no longer met requirements for scalability and flexibility. To these ends, IRCE deployed a single, integrated hardware and software solution, Oracle Database Appliance to provide extensive security controls and high availability, while simplifying implementation and reducing maintenance costs.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from IRCE

  • “Oracle Database Appliance, combined with its rapid implementation and zero maintenance costs, represented the ideal solution, enabling us to guarantee service continuity with a high degree of scalability.” – Andrea Casadio, Chief Information Officer, IRCE

  • Increase control of wire and cable production by adopting a single, integrated solution to ensure high availability, permit interoperability between hardware and software, and efficiently provide information for use at all the group’s locations
  • Permit migration and updates of the current management system, while ensuring service continuity
  • Update the obsolete hardware infrastructure with a scalable system that the company can adapt as space and calculation requirements grow
  • Reduce database management costs and requirements to free up the IT team for other strategic priorities

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Database Appliance as a single solution with integrated hardware and software to consolidate various database systems and optimize the IT infrastructure now shared by various production sites
  • Updated the system to Oracle Database 11g, which allows service continuity, faster access to resources, and a higher level of data protection to ensure manufacturing proceeds without interruptions
  • Enabled standardized procedures and ensured system scalability with a more flexible structure that can follow the business’s evolution by reducing technical infrastructure while managing costs and the number of suppliers
  • Eliminated database administration and maintenance tasks and enabled the company to schedule and automate all jobs—from backups to indexing, statistics, and checking database integrity—as well as to refocus internal resources on more strategic tasks, while increasing system performance significantly
  • Reduced database backup window from eight hours to under one hour and optimized the recovery activity with a single, centralized backup solution
  • Installed the system in only two hours with no impact on users, ultimately eliminating the need to use specialized support that would have required several days for the installation

Why Oracle

IRCE chose Oracle Database Appliance because it is a complete, engineered system including server, software, networking, and storage in a single package with a competitive price-to-performance ratio. The company considered other solutions, including IBM and Linux clusters, each which would have been more complex and costly to implement and maintain.

Implementation Process

IRCE completed the implementation very quickly, in fewer than two hours. 

Partner

As technical partner, Oracle partner Mediamente S.r.l. helped design the software architecture for the new system.
 

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