Texas A&M uses Oracle Exadata for faster performance

One of the country’s largest research universities, Texas A&M spent more than $1.13 billion during the 2020 fiscal year in pursuit of new ideas, inventions, and innovations. The school is one of only 17 institutions in the US to have a triple designation as a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant university.

Grants pay the tab for much of that research. Texas A&M’s information systems needed a refresh that would allow the grant management team to move more efficiently in support of the university’s researchers, including improving the performance of their executive portal and strengthening their overall infrastructure.

Texas A&M chose Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer for its speed and access to the tools that are included with the cloud subscription—without any additional licensing—such as Oracle Database In-Memory and Oracle Active Data Guard. Using Exadata Cloud@Customer gave the team the computing performance they needed with the option to add capacity to meet spikes in demand, while also eliminating the time and expense needed for hardware maintenance and updates. It  also offered security, reliability, speed, and convenience, which made it the right fit.

Using Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer gives Texas A&M’s information systems a faster and more trusted solution for grant management. As a holder of multiple grant designations, the university must ensure these processes run smoothly. Procedures running on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, such as accessing accounts, now take only 2 seconds versus 10 seconds previously. Faster access time, while only several seconds shorter, makes a positive impact on the user experience, especially for staff who have to retrieve dozens of accounts for researchers who constantly need to track resources, equipment, funds from different sponsors, and how funds are being managed.

Also, the university no longer has to worry about the cost of maintaining hardware, or the risk from hardware failures. “That’s a big benefit to me to not have to worry about my support contracts or monitoring whether my hardware is failing or not,” says Leonarda Horvat, director of research information systems. “It’s nice after so many years of having to worry about every single piece, to have somebody take care of those components.”

Exadata Cloud@Customer also offers more flexibility in running huge batch processes that need more computing resources for a very limited amount of time. “We have what we purchased, but if we need more resources, they’re available on this machine. We pay a little extra to burst, and then we are back to our current environment, which is an additional resource that we didn’t have before Exadata Cloud@Customer,” says Horvat.

Oracle offered the support needed for Texas A&M to continue its strong standing as a research institution, and to pursue current goals such as developing clinical research partnerships with nearby clinics, and to promote interdisciplinary programs to collaborate on the world’s most pressing problems.