Paragon Data GmbH Improves Book Trade Performance by Consolidating Databases
 
 

Paragon Data GmbH Improves Book Trade Performance by Consolidating Databases

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Paragon Data GmbH acts as an IT service provider that runs the data center for its parent company Deutsche Buchhandelsholding (German Booktrade Holding), which markets renowned book labels, such as Weltbild Plus and Hugendubel. Paragon Data required a high-performance, secure, and stable IT infrastructure to support its parent company’s 900 bookstores.

To meet these requirements, it selected and deployed Oracle’s technology stack—including Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Edition on Oracle Linux, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Partitioning. Today, Paragon Data is known for its profitable, secure, and cost-effective outsourcing solutions, such as server hosting and housing, within the IT services market. 

Paragon Data consolidated its legacy IT environments into one high-performance eight-node Oracle Real Application Clusters instance, which significantly improved performance, while reducing its IT management costs by 30 % to 40 %.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Paragon Data GmbH

  • “Thanks to our comprehensive Oracle technology stack, we can deliver a secure, high-performance, and scalable infrastructure to our parent company, German Booktrade Holding, and its more than 900 bookstores.” – Christian Trieb, Senior Database Administrator, Paragon Data GmbH

  • Improve enterprise resource planning (ERP) application and data warehouse performance, even as data from German Booktrade Holding’s 900 bookstores increases exponentially
  • Establish a scalable environment to support the bookseller’s point-of-sale systems, avoid bottlenecks during the busy December holiday season, and efficiently run daily book trade operations
  • Improve customer service with highly available product and book inventory data
  • Streamline IT management to reduce costs and optimize database administrator (DBA) productivity

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Established an eight-node instance ofOracle Real Application Clusters to consolidate all parent-company databases—which power ERP applications, as well as the data warehouse—to ensure high availability
  • Achieved significant performance improvements, particularly in the 1.4 Terabyte ERP system’s search functionality, which 3,500 employees use daily to minimize wait time for bookstore customers at the point of sale
  • Improved report batch processing speed by 20 %, so management reports can be provided in a more timely fashion
  • Achieved high availability for order processing, time tracking, and accounting applications with Oracle’s cluster environment to avoid downtime and loss of revenue
  • Optimized hardware requirements by implementing the Oracle-based cluster environment as Paragon Data requires less hardware, which further reduced costs through less energy consumption and space requirements
  • Implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager and other database management tools to automate and streamline IT management, enabling four database administrators (DBAs) to manage 30 % to 40 % more databases
  • Gained the ability to set up additional test databases within one hour instead of days with Oracle VM, improving IT team productivity

Why Oracle

Paragon Data has counted Oracle as a strategic partner since 2003, when the company deployed its ERP environment—unique to the book trade industry—based on Oracle Database.

“We believe Oracle is the technology leader—in particular for database performance and scalability—which is vitally important to us. Where it makes sense, we want to offer our customers the most modern technology possible, and Oracle enables us to meet this goal while ensuring high availability and stability,” said Christian Trieb, senior database administrator, Paragon Data GmbH.

Oracle also offers the complete technology stack—spanning the operating system, database, and management system levels, as well as back-up and virtualization layers. This approach streamlines support and system management.

“Thanks of Oracle’s top technology, we are in a position to provide excellent database services for our customers,” said Udo Würtz, managing partner, Paragon Data GmbH.

Resources

Paragon Data sorgt mit erfolgreicher Datenbank-Konsolidierung für mehr Performance im Buchhandel