Deutsche Bank aims to run 10,000 Oracle Databases with 50% less energy

Deutsche Bank taps Oracle Autonomous Database 23ai on Exadata Cloud@Customer to gain cost efficiency and help meet sustainability goals.

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We chose Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer because it offers the best combination of high availability, cost efficiency, and performance. And because we are a financial institution, security and privacy are of utmost importance. It’s absolute.

Marcus PraetzasGlobal Head of Databases, Deutsche Bank

Business challenges

Companies across industries are processing increasing amounts of data to improve customer service, provide better insights, and prevent problems before they arise. As a turnaround effort by Germany’s Deutsche Bank gains momentum, its work with Oracle to modernize the data handling software behind its various trading, risk management, and capital planning processes underlines technology’s importance in helping banks gain a competitive edge.

Oracle Databases underpin most of Deutsche Bank’s applications and store more than 40 petabytes of its data. The bank is moving its databases worldwide to more current versions, including Oracle Autonomous Database, running on the high-performance Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer platform managed by Oracle in a private cloud.

Deutsche Bank’s technology modernization plan aims to help it simplify operations, exercise better controls, and reduce expenses and energy consumption. The bank expects the move to Oracle Cloud to reduce by more than 50% the energy used to run more than 10,000 databases—a significant contribution to Deutsche Bank’s sustainability goals.

Why Deutsche Bank Chose Oracle

Deutsche Bank turned to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, with the fully managed option of Oracle Autonomous Database, as part of its efforts to lower costs, add new capabilities, and keep certain data on premises to help it continue complying with European data protection rules. In a demonstration of how large companies are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud environments, the bank in 2020 struck a public cloud partnership with another cloud provider.

Results

The Oracle Database migration, scheduled to be completed by the end of 2025, is expected to save the bank low triple-digit millions of euros in costs.

In contrast to software that runs in the public cloud, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer database services run in the bank’s own computing centers—so Deutsche Bank pays the electricity bill. Here the more than 50% in expected energy savings comes from Oracle Exadata machines running databases much more efficiently and on fewer total servers than with its previous x86 servers.

The Cloud@Customer arrangement lets Deutsche Bank, which is Germany’s largest bank, keep control of customer data, while Oracle Customer Success Services manages database upgrades and migrations. With better workload isolation, Deutsche Bank group members can share resources across some applications while deploying dedicated resources for others. The Cloud@Customer deployment also delivers lower network latency compared with public clouds, especially critical for banking applications that require near real-time responses to market events.

Two years into its partnership with Oracle, Deutsche Bank moved its credit risk application, with highly variate data, to Oracle Autonomous Database. Query performance increased by 7X, which helped the bank improve its risk assessments. In addition, the bank’s fraud prevention and anti-money laundering improved by blending Oracle Autonomous Database’s embedded network graph analytics into business processes, thereby reducing data integration costs and time for operationalizing new alerts.

Additional benefits of the database modernization project and partnership with Oracle Customer Success Services include enhanced security and increased automation. This improvement helped to reduce manual data administration tasks and increase application stability by reducing configuration errors.

Deutsche Bank has been working with the Oracle development and customer success teams on adding features, Praetzas says. For example, one feature controls who at Oracle can access its system to do maintenance and support. “So this has been a great partnership,” he says.

Published:January 10, 2025