Global Financial Services Company uses GridApp Clarity™ to Automate Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase

Industry: Financial

A global financial services company uses GridApp Clarity™ as their centralized system to automate database patching and enforce standard database builds across more than 2,000 database servers worldwide. Clarity database automation software enables the company to drive efficiency, ensure compliance, reduce downtime, accelerate time to market, and save money.

Overview:

This global financial services company is one of the world's leading wealth management companies. They recognized that deploying and managing complex database environments, like Oracle RAC and clustered SQL Server, was not only consuming significant time, but also was highly dependent on a small number of their key personnel. With more than 2,000 heterogeneous database servers having to meet the highest industry performance standards, they required a more manageable way to patch, provision, and upgrade their databases with their existing DBA staff. GridApp Clarity was overwhelmingly selected as the Enterprise solution capable of managing their Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase databases.

GridApp Clarity™ Solution:

GridApp Clarity provided a dramatic improvement for rolling out new databases, as well as patching existing environments. In one example, GridApp Clarity helped reduce the Oracle RAC deployment time by 95%, providing a repeatable method for a junior level DBA to rollout a complex Oracle cluster. Clarity also provided a single-console view for the DBAs to manage their databases centrally.

This global financial services company had strict requirements for the GridApp Clarity automation project to ensure the software could meet the large-scale needs of the bank. These included the ability to perform up to 100 simultaneous patching jobs and support more than 5,000 database servers globally. With up-time being imperative, they required the management server to run in high availability configuration to protect against node failure and support 24x7 operations.

Other featured benefits of GridApp Clarity include:

  • Enforcement of standards for complex environments (i.e. Windows clusters and Oracle RAC), which includes audit policies, user access, configuration information, and file layout

  • Ability to execute any number of pre and post provisioning activities as part of a Clarity Provisioning Job. This automation continues to have tremendous impact on efficiency and standardization.

  • Dramatic time reduction to provision and patch databases

  • Deskilling - the ability to push senior database activities to junior level people

  • Cross-skilling - empowering generalists to handle bulk tasks for the database (i.e. a SQL person can deploy Oracle RAC)

  • Enablement of DBAs to drive more value while improving service levels without hiring new staff

"GridApp Clarity improved our database operations, reducing the deployment of a 5 node Oracle RAC cluster by 98% - from 5 weeks to a half day. We are currently working with GridApp Systems to integrate more custom work to further improve efficiency in our data center."

- April Cai, Oracle DBA