GridApp Clarity™ Simplifies Patch Management
for Complex Database Infrastructures
Industry: Banking
One of the world's largest financial institutions was experiencing mounting problems managing over 30,000 Oracle databases. Despite the organization's best efforts to employ standard operating procedures, keep up with patch requirements, and enforce baselining across the database infrastructure, more than 500 DBAs were spending a minimum of 80 percent of their time addressing problems and putting out fires.
The Problem:
In the highly competitive banking and financial services industry, the protection and processing of data is of paramount importance. In spite of its extensive resources and its commitment to best practices, one of the world's largest and most prestigious financial institutions was having trouble addressing the gross inefficiencies in managing its Oracle database infrastructure.
Many of these problems centered on inconsistent patching. With Oracle recommending an average of two patches per month per database, the biggest challenge for the team was keeping up with the 720,000 patches that needed to be installed yearly - many of which required downtime.
"What ended up happening is that some patches simply didn't get installed," said one DBA. "That was the main source of our problems."
The GridApp Clarity Solution:
GridApp Clarity enables organizations to automate patch installation, reducing the time required to implement patches from days and weeks to a matter of hours. Using the Clarity interface, IT managers can test their patches in sandbox and testing environments before rolling out the patches across as many or as few databases as they choose. The Clarity console also enables the organization to easily cross-check patch installation across the entire infrastructure and allows them to monitor any changes in performance.
Clarity simplifies patch installation, resulting in up to a 75 percent decrease in the time and resources required for deployment. Moreover, the robust Clarity configuration management functionality ensures users can confirm which databases have been patched, and when and why they were patched, to ensure maximum database security and efficiency.