Oracle Customer Success — Paragon Data GmbH

Paragon Data Enables Medium-Sized Retail Organization to Slash Database Licensing Costs without Losing Application Performance

“The outstanding flexibility of Oracle Database Cloud Service enables us to deliver a new database operating model for small and medium-sized customers. It allows customers to cut database licensing costs substantially while delivering the best cost-value ratio.

— Malthe Griesel, Head of Oracle Infrastructure and Database Services, Paragon Data

Paragon Data GmbH (Paragon) runs the data center for its parent company, Deutsche Buch Handels GmbH & Co. KG (DBH), a book trading market leader in Germany. Paragon provides high-performing, secure, and stable IT infrastructure to more than 450 bookstores across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—each with up to 80,000 articles in stock and more than 10 million deliverable articles.

Paragon also serves third-party customers, offering secure and cost-effective outsourcing solutions to small and midsized companies. Paragon is an Oracle Platinum Partner with more than 15 years’ experience in Oracle Databases and is a member of the Oracle Database beta test program.

Challenges

Enable a medium-sized organization to cut database licensing costs in order to ensure competitiveness in the hard-fought German retail market, without negatively affecting day-to-day operations in stores and online shops
Deploy a flexible database operating model that ensures the customer’s databases are always available—in the cloud or in Paragon’s data center—without overstretching the customer’s budget for database licenses
Ensure data safety and protection, a strong focus among German companies, independently of where databases are hosted—in a private cloud, in a hybrid cloud, or in the public cloud

Results

Substantially cut database licensing costs—a major cost factor for a medium-sized retail company whose applications and day-to-day operations rely heavily on database availability—by enabling Paragon’s retail customer to get subscription-based access to reliable, scalable, and elastic cloud environments
Maintained performance for the retail organization’s enterprise resource planning system (ERP) and online shops, a major benefit for Paragon Data’s customer who expected slower applications as a result of lower database license costs, as Oracle Database Cloud Service is deployed on enterprise-grade infrastructure only
Ensured maximum database availability by deploying the same database locally on Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance in Paragon Data’s data center, enabling the customer to enjoy the same availability it enjoyed previously when it ran Oracle Real Application Clusters on-premises at the customer data center

Provided the robustness and wide range of Oracle Database features—such as SQL and PS/SQL support, identity management for user repository, and single sign-on—in the cloud, and ensured data protection by encrypting all data, such as credit card data of consumers
Achieved a near-zero downtime migration of 6 terabytes of data by using Oracle GoldenGate to move data from the customer's data center to a locally hosted Oracle Database, and by using Oracle Active Data Guard to upload data to Oracle Database Cloud Service
Gave Paragon’s retail customer the flexibility to cancel database hosting contracts at short notice, a key requirement of the customer’s US-based parent organization
Delivered best-in-class features such as triple mirroring of storage for data redundancy, full system backup and restore, and industrial-strength physical and logical security for a total cost of ownership (TCO) approximately 3x lower than compared to a traditional on-premises solution consisting of commodity servers and locally hosted databases

For small and medium-sized retailers, Oracle Database Cloud Service is the ideal solution. The world’s leading database, combined with Oracle Java Cloud Service, makes it possible for any small or midsized firm to develop and deploy web-based applications with low TCO and short time to market.

— Malthe Griesel, Head of Oracle Infrastructure and Database Services, Paragon Data

Execution

Paragon Data invested two months in testing the setup and migration from the customer data center to a locally hosted Oracle Database on Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance and to Oracle Database Cloud Service. The company needed to ensure sufficient network bandwidth between its data center and Oracle’s cloud and a near-zero downtime migration for its retail customer.

Paragon Data received continuous support during implementation from Oracle Premier Support and Oracle’s Customer Success Manager to remove road blocks such as not scaling storage. The deployment was successfully realized within five months and on budget.