Cerved boosts performance and flexibility with Exadata Database Service and OCI
March 20, 2024 | 5 minute read
Authored by Kellsey Ruppel, principal product marketing director at Oracle, Maria Tomescu, business development senior manager at Oracle, and Flavio Mauri, CIO at Cerved.
Figure 1: Cerved is a tech company and market leader in the data and algorithm sector. Cerved supports businesses, public sector entities, and financial institutions in their strategy development and planning.
Cerved provides companies and financial institutions with credit assessment, management, and recovery services based on vast amounts of data and advanced algorithms. The company turns data into strategic solutions, helping the productive world grow and prosper over the short, medium, and long term. Cerved provides solutions that utilize advanced technologies, advanced analytical, and monitoring processes, as well as vertical skills and strategic partnerships.
Goals for cloud migration
Cerved was looking to provide their customers with valuable business insights using the latest cloud technology so they could process vast amounts of data for more predictability and context, boost performance to foster innovation, and accelerate development of new applications. Because Cerved’s business was growing rapidly, they were looking to exit their on-premises data centers and a smooth migration to the cloud.
Why Cerved chose Oracle
Cerved chose Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure because they had a long and good experience with performance and high availability of Exadata on-premises. By migrating the Exadata Databases to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Cerved can now manage resources using just a web interface, and because Cerved choose the Full License option, they can use all the database products they need.
“By migrating our core business databases to Oracle Cloud, we experienced better performance using the same trusted Exadata technology. Now we also enjoy the flexibility benefits of the cloud being able to scale up simultaneously with our business growth,” says Flavio Mauri, CIO at Cerved.
Suite of Oracle products used
OCI includes all the services needed to migrate, build, and run IT in the cloud, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud native applications and data platforms. Cerved used the following OCI services and technologies:
- Oracle Exadata Database Service: Oracle Exadata Database Service is an automated Oracle Database service that allows organizations to run databases with the highest performance, availability, security, and cost effectiveness. Databases run faster and with fewer resources on scale-out Exadata infrastructure that includes unique optimizations for transaction processing, analytics, and mixed workloads. Online scaling of compute resources enables customers to quickly adjust consumption to match workload demands without interrupting operations while efficient database consolidation lowers total costs. Full compatibility with on-premises Oracle Database and Exadata environments makes it easy for customers to migrate workloads to the cloud.
- FastConnect: OCI FastConnect provides an easy way to create a dedicated, private connection between your data center OCI. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG): The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between virtual cloud networks (VCNs) in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another OCI region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets: A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an OCI region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple nonoverlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which you can scope to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Region: An OCI region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them across countries or even continents.
- Block Volume: The OCI Block Volume service lets you dynamically provision and manage block storage volumes. You can create, attach, connect, and move volumes and change volume performance as needed to meet your storage, performance, and application requirements.
- Oracle dynamic performance scaling: Block Volume provides dynamic performance scaling with autotuning. This feature enables you to configure your volumes so that the service adjusts the performance level automatically to optimize performance.
- Active Data Guard: Active Data Guard enables read-only access to a physical standby database while Redo Apply is active. Queries and reports can be offloaded from the production system to a synchronized physical standby database. All queries at the standby database return up-to-date results.
- Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC): RAC allow customers to run a single Oracle Database across multiple servers to maximize availability and enable horizontal scalability, while accessing shared storage. User sessions connecting to Oracle RAC instances can failover and safely replay changes during outages, without any changes to end user applications, hiding the impact of the outages from end users.
- Oracle Multitenant: Oracle Multitenant enables an Oracle Database to function as a container database (CDB). A CDB consolidates multiple pluggable databases (PDB), a portable collection of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects. Whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud, with Oracle Multitenant, applications run unchanged in self-contained PDBs, improving resource utilization, management, and overall security.
- Transparent Data Encryption (TDE): TDE transparently encrypts data at rest in Oracle Databases. It stops unauthorized attempts from the operating system to access database data stored in files, without impacting how applications access the data using SQL. TDE can encrypt entire application tablespaces or specific sensitive columns. TDE is fully integrated with Oracle database.
Migration path
Cerved did a six-month pilot with Oracle Professional Services using OCI, which gave them the assurance to consider migrating to the cloud. Cerved also evaluated Amazon Web Service (AWS) for their relation database management service, but they found the proposal wasn’t comparable to OCI.
Figure 2: Reference architecture for Cerved’s deployment.
Results
By consolidating 44 databases to six and migrating to a dedicated Oracle Exadata Database Service and OCI, Cerved automated backup, which freed staff for more productive architecture tasks and faster development with new data sets. Oracle FastConnect also allows multilcoud with AWS, where Cerved’s custom applications are hosted, delivering low latency of 2 milliseconds. This streamlining brought more intelligent risk solutions to customers.
With OCI, Cerved gained flexibility and scalability, compared to on-premises, to ensure future business growth. The company also improved performance by upgrading, from X6 on-premises to X8M running in the cloud, which allowed for faster processing of large amounts of data to provide customers with the right insights at the right time for informed decision-making.
Additional links
For more information on Cerved and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, see the following resources: