Mart Minas gains 40% in performance with maximum availability architecture

Mart Minas had been running its database and enterprise workloads on off-the-shelf x86 servers. In April 2018, the company deployed Oracle Exadata X6 on-premises to achieve high performance and end-to-end security, and then moved to Exadata Cloud@Customer X7.

While Exadata Machine offered high performance, the company encountered limitations with how fast it could scale its infrastructure, hindering business growth. To guarantee operational success, Mart Minas required an elastically scalable database platform in the cloud.

In 2022, the company ran a cost-benefit analysis and identified the cloud as the preferred infrastructure. The wholesaler wanted to reduce operating costs associated with maintaining and tuning its on-premises Exadata machine. It also wanted to keep migration costs to the cloud as low as possible.

Mart Minas selected Oracle Exadata Database Service because it offered security features to support the company’s business continuity and growth plans. After a cost-benefit analysis, Oracle came out on top with elastic scaling and increased performance at a lower cost than other cloud database providers.

Because the company was already an Oracle Exadata user since 2018, Oracle Exadata Database Service running on Oracle Exadata Infrastructure X9M was a natural fit.

Mart Minas also valued Oracle’s extensive experience with complex retail environments and its understanding of the sector’s business challenges.

To remain competitive in Brazil’s fast-paced retail industry, Mart Minas migrated the 25 TB database supporting its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and points of sale systems to Oracle Exadata Database Service, running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X9M in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with the highest reliability and performance. The company is the first Oracle customer in Brazil to leverage a dedicated Exadata Cloud infrastructure.

With OCI, Mart Minas decreased the time required for server procurement, delivery, and installation from several months to just minutes. The agility gained from Oracle Cloud’s on-demand scalability enables the company to easily provision IT resources, supporting agility and empowering business growth. Currently, the company reports system performance gains of 40%.

Consolidating its ERP database on a single service, Mart Minas improved operational efficiency with fast Online Transaction processing (OLTP). The company foresees using the database’s capability for in-memory analytics.

Mart Minas also uses Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle Real Application Clusters to deliver a Maximum Availability Architecture, guaranteeing 24/7 availability of its in-store services and enterprise applications for smooth operations across 52 retail and wholesale stores.

To facilitate the communication between its ERP and POS systems and Oracle Database, Mart Minas relies on OCI’s FastConnect service, which provides a dedicated and secure connection over trusted endpoints. Through consistent performance and low latency, Mart Minas ensures real-time synchronization of its ERP databases for instant decision-making.

Working with more than 10,000 stock-keeping units per store, the increased system performance, powered by 20 Oracle Central Processing Units (OCPUs) in an Exadata X9M quarter-rack configuration, enables Mart Minas to improve the shopping experience by speeding up numerous services—such as point of sale systems and purchased goods scanning.

Upgrading from Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X7 to Oracle Database Service running on Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, Mart Minas reduced its total cost of ownership by consolidating six databases—including production, test, and quality assurance database workloads—onto a single cloud service.

Mart Minas worked with Oracle Partners Sky.One and DBMaster to migrate its on-premises database and enterprise workloads to Oracle Exadata Database Service running on Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M. The migration was completed in 60 days, half of the expected time of 120 days, with no significant impact on users. The project was completed at almost US$80,000 under budget.

With its disaster recovery site already deployed on Oracle Cloud, Mart Minas used the corresponding Oracle Database as a starting point for two weeks before migrating its main database to OCI, with just a few minutes of downtime to configure DNS records.

“We were thrilled by the technical expertise provided by Sky.One and DBMaster and positively surprised with the outcome of the cooperation,” says Helton Lima, IT manager.