Deutsche Bank aims to run 10,000 databases with 50% less energy
Deutsche Bank taps Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to gain big cost savings and help meet sustainability goals.
“Oracle fits into [our] strategy and complements our existing journey. There will be applications staying in the on-premises world, and we need to invest in simplifying them. It fully supports our cloud strategy, supports consuming technology as a service, and comes with significant financial and sustainability benefits.”
Business challenges
Companies across industries are processing increasing amounts of data to improve customer service, provide better insights, and prevent issues 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 various trading, risk management, and capital planning underlines technology’s importance in helping banks gain a competitive edge. CEO Christian Sewing has made simplifying and modernizing the bank’s technology one of his signature efforts, to set the bank up for what comes next.
Oracle Databases underpin the majority of Deutsche Bank’s applications and store more than 40 petabytes of its data. In June 2021, the bank said it will move databases worldwide to more current versions running on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, which provides high-performance database services managed by Oracle in a private cloud.
Bernd Leukert, Chief Technology, Data, and Innovation Officer at Deutsche Bank, has embarked on an IT modernization plan that aims to simplify the bank’s 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 as part of the bank’s efforts to lower costs, add 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 migration, to unfold over the next three to five years, 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 than the existing conventional x86 servers in use.
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. Additional benefits of the database modernization project and partnership with Oracle Customer Success Services are personalized and proactive lifecycle management support, including enhanced security and increased automation, which reduces manual data administration tasks and increases application stability by reducing configuration errors.
“In the old days all of this would be our responsibility,” Leukert says. “This is a big relief for us as well from a people, skill, and competency level. Process complexity drives costs.”
Deutsche Bank is on a drive to internalize its technology talent, with the aim to have engineers make up over half of the bank’s technology organization by the end of 2022.