Equinix lifts performance and productivity with Oracle Exadata
Equinix migrated all its Oracle databases from other platforms and consolidated them on Oracle Exadata to increase performance, availability, and efficiency.
“Our investment in Oracle Exadata has exceeded our expectations. Not only did we address our biggest challenge of increasing performance for the Siebel CRM platform by an average of 40 percent and 4X to 5X on large queries, we also reaped the benefits of consolidating all of our databases onto Exadata, reduced our 287 databases by half, lowered administration, improved uptime, and saved 50 percent of our legacy costs.”
Business challenges
Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company, with over 230 data centers in 65 markets, has grown rapidly in recent years. More than 10,000 enterprise customers trust Equinix to power their innovation and commerce with private, physical colocation and virtual interconnect services across multiple, public cloud vendors.
Equinix uses Siebel as a CRM platform to process critical sales, service, and on-site security access to data centers for thousands of employees. The Oracle Database supporting Siebel was running on servers, storage, and networking products from multiple vendors. Due to Equinix’s scale and rapid growth, it was experiencing inconsistent performance and availability with the legacy solution. The company wanted to improve performance, reduce administration, and maintain full control of its infrastructure while also increasing business agility by being able to quickly deploy new applications in the cloud to address new business opportunities.
Why Equinix chose Oracle
Equinix had a long history of using Oracle Database products. It selected Oracle Exadata as the best place to host all company transactional and analytical databases with the high performance, availability, and control the business required.
Results
The California-based company, which specializes in internet connection and data centers, improved performance for the Siebel CRM platform by at least 40% and large batch queries by 4X to 5X using Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M, without changing a single line of code. Exadata X8M takes advantage of persistent memory and RDMA over Converged Ethernet, which lowers I/O latency, a crucial factor in increasing transactional performance for Equinix.
After realizing consistent performance with Siebel workloads, Equinix decided to consolidate all of its databases onto Exadata for additional, unanticipated benefits. The company reduced the total number of databases by 51%, from 287 databases to 138, which lowered administration and improved availability. Time spent patching OS and databases was reduced by 90% with Exadata’s automated patching using pre-tested, full-stack patch sets. The amount of compute and memory capacity Equinix required was reduced by 30% because not all databases have peak requirements at the same time. Exadata’s redundant infrastructure and Oracle Real Application Clusters, which run a single Oracle Database across multiple servers in Exadata, eliminated previous points of failure for more uptime.
Equinix’s IT staff was able to reduce overall database management times by 30%, including a 70% reduction in manual application tuning time by DBAs. About 4,000 hours per year of database maintenance tasks were automated and repurposed for more value-added activities. With Oracle providing single-vendor support across hardware, OS, and database, Equinix simplified the diagnosis and resolution of any issues that arise. Due to greater efficiency in database licensing and labor optimization from Exadata, the company has saved roughly 50% of the costs from its legacy environment.
In addition to running Equinix’s critical applications on Oracle Exadata systems in its own data centers, Equinix Fabric seamlessly connects other applications in the cloud to its Exadata. This hybrid architecture gives Equinix the freedom to run cloud-native apps and those with highly variable server demands in the cloud while still benefiting from the high performance, efficiency, and security of databases running on Oracle Exadata in the company’s data centers.