Trafigura Guarantees Availability, Scalability, and Database Performance across Global Trading Business
 
 

Trafigura Guarantees Availability, Scalability, and Database Performance across Global Trading Business

  • Oracle Customer:  Trafigura
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Oil and Gas
    Employees:  6,000
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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Trafigura is the world’s third-largest independent oil trader and the second-largest independent trader in nonferrous concentrates. With 67 offices in 44 countries worldwide, the company handles every element involved in sourcing and trading crude oil, petroleum products, renewable energies, metals, metal ores, coal, and nonferrous concentrates for industrial consumers.

Capitalizing on its resource trading and investment expertise, Trafigura has also diversified into asset management through its wholly-owned subsidiary Galena Asset Management, which develops offshore hedge funds and has more than U$1.2 billion in funds currently under management.

Currently trading more than 9 million tons of concentrates each year and more than 2.5 million barrels of crude and oil products every day, Trafigura is rapidly expanding through acquisition.

Trafigura needed to implement an infrastructure to cope with its continued growth and business diversification. It chose to consolidate all its databases onto Oracle to ensure full disaster recovery, improve performance, and provide unlimited scalability for future growth.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word fromTrafigura

  • “With Oracle Real Application Clusters, we have unlimited scalability and improved performance. This scalability is unique to Oracle. We could not have achieved it with another vendor." – Dean Logan Wood, Global Head of Database Technology, Trafigura

  • Consolidate all legacy systems as part of strategic plan to move from a mix of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database to standardize on Oracle to ensure full disaster recovery, improve performance, and provide unlimited scalability for future growth
  • Introduce the infrastructure to redevelop and move all trading applications for oil and gas commodities to Oracle Database over a five-year period
  • Ensure that databases are able to manage the rapidly-increasing volumes of data and information as Trafigura expands its oil-and-concentrates trading business through acquisition
  • Build a scalable platform with full-disaster-recovery capability to manage growth as business expands and diversifies on a global scale
  • Guarantee full availability of business-critical applications across global offices through fully achievable service-level agreements
  • Maximize use of server and storage infrastructure
  • Reduce costs of administering multiple databases and improve quality of IT support for internal business units

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Migrated existing Oracle databases onto a high availability, clustered, disaster recovery environment, providing onsite failover within minutes, instead of relying on offsite backups
  • Moved 36 Oracle production databases previously deployed on Windows and Linux to the new Oracle Database grid infrastructure to provide improved performance and guaranteed failovers in the fast-moving oil and nonferrous concentrates trading markets
  • Hosted business-critical applications for trading oil, gas, and ferrous and nonferrous composites, as well as data warehousing and business-critical reporting on Oracle databases—guaranteeing high availability worldwide
  • Used Oracle Partitioning to manage 28 terabytes of data and support a growth volume of 20% to 30% per year
  • Improved system reliability with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Active Data Guard and reduced maintenance window from up to one day to less than two hours
  • Enabled the company to better support acquisitions and react to the global trading market with the ability to increase the volumes traded on demand
  • Streamlined the process for implementing a new application or bringing a new acquisition into the organization with new applications fully provisioned within hours rather than days, as before
  • Consolidated 20 servers to 7, improving performance while also increasing the number of databases supported tenfold, to more than 200
  • Significantly reduced the overhead required to maintain and manage databases and servers through 99% automation and reduction in the number of servers
  • Expected to achieve a full return on investment within three years

Why Oracle

Trafigura made the strategic decision to move all of its databases and core applications onto Oracle Database 11g. The move to grid computing is part of a strategic plan to ensure that the organization has the capability, capacity, and ability to respond to market demands as it continues to grow rapidly via acquisition.

“We looked at expanding our Microsoft estate but decided that would have been the wrong direction to take,” said Dean Logan Wood, global head of database technology, Trafigura “Oracle provides a much more mature solution. It offers greater enterprise capability and is more suitable for large-scale environments. We now have the infrastructure in place to meet our requirements as a fast-moving and rapidly-growing business. As we continue to acquire energy sector assets, we can quickly integrate those new businesses into our portfolio.”