Lalux innovates using Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer
The Luxembourg-based insurance company turns to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to maintain data sovereignty while modernizing its IT infrastructure.
“We were dealing with Solvency 2, Cloud Guidelines IT Governance, GDPR, and more. Staying compliant with these rules consumes an important part of the budget and workload at the expense of innovation projects. However, a generation of new technology, especially around data, represents a huge opportunity for Lalux as an innovation enabler.”
Business challenges
Because its existing hardware was close to end of life, Lalux needed to consider the best options for running 40-plus Oracle Databases. The insurer’s main challenges were cybersecurity and industry-standard regulations. Staying compliant with these rules consumed money and workloads, at the expense of innovation.
In the end, if you have a private or hybrid cloud enterprise strategy, and if you are running Oracle Databases, then I would recommend considering Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer as a possible answer.
Why Lalux Chose Oracle
The company needed to modernize its infrastructure and improve service for applications. Also, dataset automation and orchestration of workloads was important, as well as facilitating storage administration by reducing operational complexity.
In addition, the insurer wanted more storage and CPU provisioning flexibility. For example, its database servers showed only 19% compute utilization on average, but without possible bursting to handle peaks. Finally, to respect local and international regulatory compliance constraints, a private cloud platform was the logical choice.
Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer represented not only a huge opportunity to innovate, but also provided a full appliance owned and managed by Oracle but hosted in a Lalux data center.
Results
Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer provides enough capacity to handle peaks in workloads that are more than 6X higher than the company’s previous infrastructure. The company was able to refresh its databases, which are now 2X faster than its older ones.
In addition, Lalux saw improved batch performance for almost all jobs, and as much as 3X better for jobs using some PLSQL program units.
From a storage point of view, Oracle offered enough capacity to support Lalux's new projects for the next five years. Also, the company now has new ways of designing IT solutions with many database features that were included at no additional cost, such as partitioning, advanced compression, real application testing, active data guard, and management packs.
Partners
The migration was a collaborative effort of Oracle Consulting and Lalux DBAs.