ICBF accelerates agtech analytics and services with Oracle Exadata Cloud

ICBF is dedicated to helping farmers and related organizations in ensuring the next generation of animals are more environmentally and economically sustainable than the last. ICBF has built the largest genomic database in the world for beef cattle and the second largest for dairy cattle. Over 100,000 farmers, who own almost seven million head of cattle, use this database to optimize the genetic makeup of their herds. The National Genotyping program will provide farm to fork traceability. In February 2024 ICBF processed a weekly high of 98,000 genotypes into the database becoming a world’s first in the sector.

ICBF had been operating out of on-premises data centers, with a disaster recovery (DR) center situated just a few hundred yards away. Farmers and other stakeholders accessed their centralized OLTP database via ICBF’s applications, which meant that, at any given time, the system could be processing hundreds of complex transactions in real time. As overall data volumes grew exponentially, accentuating the need to accommodate spikes in demand, the company’s existing infrastructure was strained to deliver the desired end user experience.

ICBF migrated from its HP-UX platform to Exadata Database Machine X5, which eliminated its performance and scalability bottlenecks. As the organization prepared to relocate operations to a modern data center and exit its DR facility in 2020, its Exadata platform was also due for an upgrade. Consequently, the organization used that opportunity to evaluate technology providers with the goal of establishing a long-term solution for scaling systems to rapid growth while also moving the organization closer to a cloud-first deployment strategy.

Microsoft SQL Server had been used to support the field activities of about 1,000 users. Additionally, the ICBF had experience using AWS and Azure for other workloads connected to the legacy infrastructure. Ultimately, ICBF chose Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer as an interim managed cloud service that would help the organization assess if it could move its databases to a public cloud. ICBF also selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Exadata Database Service to establish a modern and secure disaster recovery plan within an Oracle public cloud data region. These decisions were facilitated by Oracle’s bring your own license (BYOL) policies which helped ICBF to apply its existing on-premises Oracle Database licenses to OCI.

ICBF’s centralized 18 TB OLTP animal breeding database, along with its test/dev databases, now run in their new data center on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X8M. With online compute resources that scale up and down on demand, the organization pays only for the compute resources it uses.

ICBF stores 60,000 unique attributes for each of the approximately 4.3 million cattle. The expectation is that all cattle will ultimately be tracked nationally. Moving to a newer generation of Exadata (from X5 to X8) provided performance improvements that gave ICBF plenty of runway to handle the expanding data volumes and analytical queries.  For example, a preseason existing job—which previously took about one hour and 15 minutes to run—now completes in just one minute.

With Oracle’s built-in security at every layer, Exadata Cloud@Customer is trusted as the single source of information by ICBF’s 100,000-plus end users. By migrating to Exadata cloud, ICBF uses Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) technology, which is included in all Exadata cloud subscriptions at no additional cost. Oracle TDE transparently encrypts the organization’s data, helping to prevent unauthorized attempts to access data stored in files, without impacting how applications access the data using SQL.

Exadata Cloud@Customer’s high availability and automated maintenance capabilities effectively eliminated system downtime, which is critical to farmers who often need to access ICBF services 24/7. Because no cattle can be moved without the appropriate transactions within ICBFs database, even a few minutes of downtime can have a negative impact, such as when livestock are purchased.

ICBF upgraded from Oracle Exadata X5 to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X8M in close collaboration with Version 1, which has extensive expertise in Oracle delivery and implementation. The collaboration was a major success and a milestone for all involved.