Oracle Advanced Compression at Indesit (PDF)

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“Thanks to Oracle Advanced Compression we achieved huge space savings with minimal effort, which resulted in substantial and measurable cost savings. We are extremely satisfied with the results.” – LAURA BENEDETTI, IT Information Technology Department/Application Infrastructure, Indesit Company S.p.A.

Indesit Company S.p.A. http://www.indesit.com

Industry: Manufacturers and distrib­ utors of major domestic appliances (washing machines, dryers, dish­ washers, fridges, freezers, cookers, hoods, ovens and stovetops) dd Workforce: 16,000 (in Europe)

Oracle products: Oracle Database 11g for SAP; sizes prior to Advanced Compression: • 8 TB for ECC • TB for BI/BW • 1 TB for CRM

Key benefits: Space savings of 50 percent on average in each system, significant cost savings and database size reduction (7 TB in total), improved perform­ ance, reduced backup time enabling future growth

SAP: ERP ECC, SAP BW, SAP CRM, SAP PI

Infrastructure: IBM servers / storage (outsourcing)

Storage resources for ECC, BI/BW and CRM reduced by an average of 50% – costs substantially reduced

S I G N I F I C A N T S AV I N G S W I T H O R A C L E D AT A B A S E 11g A D VA N C E D C O M P R E S S I O N AT I N D E S I T C O M PA N Y

Indesit Company is one of the European lea­ ding manufacturers and distributors of major domestic appliances (washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, freezers, cookers, hoods, ovens and stovetops). The company is the undisputed leader in major markets such as Italy, the UK, and Russia. Founded in 1975 and listed on the Milan stock exchange since 1987, the Group posted sales of € 2.8 billion in 2011. Indesit Company has 14 production facilities (in Italy, Poland, the UK, Russia and Turkey) and 16,000 employees. The Group’s main brands are Indesit, Hotpoint and Scholtès. Indesit Company, a leading European manu­ facturer of household appliances, originally opted for Oracle Database and SAP over 10 years ago. The combination proved to be a stable, reliable and powerful basic infrastruc­ ture component. With every new release, Indesit expanded its capabilities – for example during the change from Oracle Database 9i to Oracle Database 10g and also from 10g to Oracle Database 11g.

Laura Benedetti from Indesit’s Information Technology / Application Infrastructure team says, “We have always benefited from the combination of SAP and Oracle. With Oracle Database 11g and the Advanced Compression feature we have achieved considerable cost savings and optimized the whole SAP IT infrastructure very effectively.” Improvements and optimizations deliver major benefits

Indesit first decided to implement long-term space savings and thus long-term cost savings with Oracle Advanced Compression techno­ logy before the switch from 10g to 11g. As soon as Oracle Database 11g appeared on the horizon, Indesit first decided to implement long-term space savings and thus long-term cost savings with Oracle Advanced Compres­ sion technology before the switch from 10g to 11g. As soon as Oracle Database 11g appeared on the horizon, the company was enthusiastic about the improvements that could be achie­ ved with the technology. Indesit decided not to make Advanced Compression productive during the migration in 2011, but was eager to achieve this as soon as circumstances allowed after the upgrade.

Oracle Advanced Compression at Indesit

Once the database migration was complete, the Application Infrastructure Team at Indesit consulted with outsourcing partner IBM to establish how best to implement Advanced Compression. It was important to Indesit that the cost and efficiency benefits of Advanced Compression should not be limited to the ERP system ECC but also extend to the BI/BW and CRM systems to maximize the savings. The SAP applications are used at virtually all Indesit sites, in Russia, the UK, Turkey, Poland, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. The SAP environment is used as the central system, while the IT infrastructure and all applications are outsourced. The applications are accessed by a total of 2,800 users, and together with Oracle Database, they keep Indesit’s essential business processes up and running. “A system failure, however brief, would have serious consequences for business,” says Laura Benedetti. Indesit: focus on Table Compression feature

The implementation and deployment of Oracle Advanced Compression was defined by Indesit’s IT team in a detailed project plan, which was worked out step by step. Their target was to achieve average space savings of around 50%. Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression offers businesses a range of compression features that translate into real cost savings. Advanced Compression includes Table Compression, RMAN Compression, Data Pump Compression and Data Guard Network Compression. The Index Compression feature was first introduced with 10g.

Indesit wanted to achieve savings with the Oracle Advanced Compression feature Table Compression (OLTP). Table Compression allows data to be compressed during all types of data manipulation operations, including conven­ tional DML such as INSERT and UPDATE. In addition, OLTP Table Compression reduces the associated compression overhead of write operations making it suitable for transactional or OLTP environments as well. OLTP Table Compression, therefore, extends the benefits of compression to all application workloads. The benefits of OLTP Table Compression go beyond just on-disk storage savings. One sig­ nificant advantage is Oracle’s ability to read compressed blocks directly without having to first uncompress the block. Therefore, there is no measurable performance degradation for accessing compressed data. In fact, in many cases performance may improve due to the reduction in I/O since Oracle will have to access fewer blocks. Further, the buffer cache will become more efficient by storing more data without having to add memory.

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Oracle Advanced Compression at Indesit

Tests confirm high expectations

Before Advanced Compression went live, the IT team and an external consulting company carried out a database analysis. “We were par­ ticularly interested in the tablespaces. The data reorganization and the activation of Oracle Advanced Compression/OLTP Table Compression were implemented one after the other or in some cases in parallel. Our out­ sourcer IBM was very much involved throug­ hout the process,” says Benedetti. Implementation and testing took place on the SAP test and development system, and the ECC system was selected as the first to benefit from Advanced Compression. The results con­ firmed the high expectations – that Oracle Advanced Compression could reduce storage space by at least 50%. The same procedure was repeated in the quality assurance system so that Advanced Compression could be utilized in the productive system.

After the ERP ECC system, Indesit tackled the BI/BW system and then the CRM system – again with substantial space savings of around 50% or slightly more. Huge benefit, minimal effort

“Thanks to Oracle Advanced Compression we achieved huge space savings with minimal effort, which resulted in substantial and meas­ urable cost savings. We are very satisfied with the results,” says Laura Benedetti. The company’s satisfaction is partly due to the fact that the outsourcing fees it pays for SAP system operation are based on resource usage, for example CPU or storage utilization. The intensive application use and growing volume of data meant that resource usage was close to exceeding the agreed levels. Oracle Advanced Compression eliminated this excessive use of resources, reducing utilization to below the agreed fixed-rate level. In concrete terms, Indesit achieved the follo­ wing database storage / space savings in the three SAP applications: Through Oracle Advanced Compression the ERP ECC data­ base volume (the required storage resources) was reduced from 8 TB to approximately 4 TB. In the BI/BW system, the database volume was reduced from 5 TB to around 2.5 TB, and in the CRM system from 1 TB to around 500 MB.