Bukhatir Group Boosts Application Availability with Oracle Engineered Systems
Bukhatir Group replaces 13 HP servers with 2 Oracle Database Appliances, boosting capacity and availability for critical applications.
The Bukhatir Group is a large, diversified business group in the United Arab Emirates. Its main interests span construction, education, information technology, real estate, retail, sports and leisure, and services. To support strong international expansion and joint ventures, Bukhatir has been using Oracle E-Business Suite since 2000-2001 in multiple business units, upgrading over time and moving through different generations of HP hardware. With the addition of several new companies to the group and hundreds of new users on a single instance, performance began lagging to the point where users were discontent and system administration became unwieldy. Bukhatir decided to find a hardware solution with better performance and lower infrastructure costs.
“Oracle Database Appliance has given us just what we needed for efficient and expanded use of our ERP system: increased capacity, high availability, and scalability. People see the difference in their daily work. It also brings down costs through virtualization and simplified system administration.”
Business challenges
Migrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business applications from underperforming servers to a platform that provides greater capacity and on-demand scalability, while catering to increased usage across business units
Increase availability across the group of the shared Oracle E-Business Suite and other applications critical for business continuity and expansion
Resolve system performance issues creating bottlenecks in data processing and hindering business users from access to reports and order fulfilment
Consolidate databases, applications, and hardware for greater efficiencies, cost savings, ease of administration, and improved monitoring
Why Bukhatir Group LLC Chose Oracle
— Mohammed Imran Tarique, Project Manager, Bukhatir Group LLC
Results
The deployment of one Oracle Database Appliance in the primary production site and another machine in the disaster recovery site took around four months, slightly longer than foreseen due to difficulties in finding shutdown time satisfying all business units. The execution was carried out by Oracle Partner Accel Frontline, which had previous experience in migrating similar workloads and knowledge of Oracle Engineered Systems. The move from HP Unix servers to Linux-based Oracle Database Appliances took place in parallel to the Bukhatir Group migrating Microsoft workloads to another platform and the entire data center being moved into an Etisalat facility in Dubai.
Replaced 13 HP Unix servers and associated storage with 2 Oracle Database Appliances, resulting in maximum availability of back office, manufacturing, and school management applications shared across multiple lines of business by more than 1,000 users of Oracle E-Business Suite and an Oracle Application Express-based school application
Slashed server and storage resource consumption to 35% to 45% of capacity when running full load ERP and student registration systems, down from 90% capacity usage before migrating to Oracle Database Appliance
Ended business disruption caused by system slowdown impacting operations such as ready-mix concrete delivery or student registration by moving Oracle Database, data warehousing and application workloads off multiple HP Unix servers onto one Oracle Database Appliance for production and a second machine for disaster recovery
Lowered operating expenses by aligning spending with business growth thanks to the pay-as-you-grow licensing model of the Oracle platform, enabling the Bukhatir Group to scale as needed to meet increasing workload demand
Eliminated time-consuming identification of input/output (I/O) bottlenecks through the top-to-bottom system view provided by the diagnostics built into Oracle Database Appliance, leading to faster issue resolution and continued availability of database applications
Reduced the time spent on maintenance, upgrading, and patching by using the pretested and integrated Oracle Database Appliance Bundle Patch for keeping the Oracle E-Business Suite platform at maximum capacity and availability, while also ensuring scalability to accommodate users from new business units
Empowered business users with uninterrupted access to resource-heavy, cross-module custom reports, cutting the time to generate forms and reports from hours to minutes, facilitating improved decision making across the group
Achieved cost-effective consolidation of servers and increased operational efficiencies across lines of business by integrating software, compute, storage, and network resources on a single platform, running both database and application workloads on Oracle Database Appliance