Expert Data Infrastructure Management & Big Data Consulting » Case Studies

World Wide Technology: From Mission Impossible to $1 Million in Savings

Maryanne Birksted — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:11:07 +0000

Company: World Wide Technology (WWT) – St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Market: IT
Key Technologies

For World Wide Technology (WWT) database performance is everything. The company does $4.2 billion a year in sales providing technology products, services, and global supply chain solutions to some of the world’s biggest companies. Seeking a new infrastructure to support in¬creasing business capacity, WWT enlisted Pythian’s expertise. The mission: a massive database upgrade and migration to be completed quickly and with minimum downtime.

Situation
WWT was running its mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on a four-year-old server. All of the company’s global warehouse operations interfaced with this platform, which couldn’t scale easily, provide a cost-effective disaster recovery solution, or deliver the higher availability offered in Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) architectures. With processing capacity maxed out—and 500,000 to 3,500,000 transactions an hour on the line—WWT had grown to the point where its hardware could not scale much further to meet the needs of the business.

Solution
WWT needed to upgrade its database to the latest version of Oracle Database 11g, migrate from WWT needed to migrate from a single-instance to a three-node clustered database, move from Solaris 9 to RedHat Linux 5.5, and upgrade from SAN to Oracle Auto¬matic Storage Management. These projects, all very involved on their own, become even more complex when attempted simultaneously— especially when everything had to be completed within a tight 40-hour mainte¬nance window.

WWT struggled to find a partner with the experience and capacity to formulate a practical migration plan and meet the project’s aggressive schedule. Leveraging its experience, expertise, and 24×7 support, Pythian took just one week to solve the problems WWT had been wrestling with for over a month. Pythian helped WWT devise an efficient implementation plan that minimized downtime and cut 22 hours from the initial timeframe. While WWT’s DBAs handled the migration itself, Pythian was on standby every step of the way, ready to provide support as needed. Pythian was asked to provide several out-of-scope items—a reflection of the level of trust that had quickly been established.

“Pythian was brought in on short notice to solve difficult challenges and they did a fantastic job… They’ve quickly become my ‘in case of emergency, break glass’ support and my most trusted advisors – I have the confidence that when I call Pythian, they’ll give me an answer than isn’t just plausible, but correct.”
– Todd Carlson, Manager, DBA/ERP Teams, World Wide Technology

Result
With Pythian’s expertise, WWT beat its downtime window by 4 hours—even with additional project scope. The project will save WWT more than $1 million over 3 years compared to its old platform.
WWT’s new architecture delivers:

• Increased capacity – 60% more capacity than previous system.
• Better performance – Most business processes run up to four times faster.
• Reduced costs – Removing 14 servers from WWT’s datacenter reduces annual maintenance.
• More uptime – New environment offers high availability, easy scalability, and cost-effective disaster recovery.
• Improved manageability – New features deliver improved application and database efficiency.

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Helping a ‘Tiny’ Operation Become a Global Giant

Maryanne Birksted — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:24:53 +0000

Company: TinyCo. – San Francisco, CA, USA
Market: Entertainment/Media
Technology:
MySQL
Rackspace
Amazon
VPN
Vertica Cluster

Serving up more than a million downloads a month, TinyCo was expanding globally and needed a single, large-scale private network to provide simplified connectivity to its secure database. They turned to Pythian as their trusted advisor to deliver around-the-clock expert support and best-in-the-business problem solving.

Situation

In the intensely competitive mobile gaming sphere, staying ahead isn’t just about developing the latest and greatest game—it’s about getting to market first and keeping a grip on consumers’ imaginations. With the popularity of its games soaring, TinyCo needed to focus on handling the mounting workload associated with getting new games to market and cope with their expansion from a small shop to a company of more than 100. They didn’t have time to manage their data infrastructure, which required more connectivity and support than traditional gaming platforms.

While TinyCo had used larger database companies in the past to support its technology infrastructure, their impersonal, help-desk-style service meant anyone from TinyCo calling in for support had to retrace technical details every time. Pythian’s expertise and dedicated team engagement model fit TinyCo’s needs.

Solution

One of Pythian’s roles was to manage TinyCo’s MySQL and Cassandra cluster, providing the game developer with a next generation architecture. Pythian was able to improve performance by a factor of three without even looking at the queries.

To address its connectivity needs, TinyCo wanted to implement a more efficient process, with fast, simple, cost effective storage and easy scalability and integration. They also wanted a Vertica cluster at Amazon to host its business intelligence database. Pythian selected the OpenVPN Access Server as a VPN gateway—meeting all of TinyCo’s requirements—implemented a site-to-site VPN between Rackspace and Amazon, and deployed a Vertica cluster at Amazon. With Pythian’s support, the result was a zero downtime migration from Rackspace to Amazon VPC.

“Pythian has been an extension of our team. I can spend eight hours researching an obscure problem or call them and they’ve probably encountered it before and can fix it. They provide us with that depth of expertise on a dime and we’ve been able to lean on them for maintenance and operation support.”
– Bo Shi, Software Engineer, TinyCo

Results

Thanks to Pythian’s expertise and support, TinyCo’s new infrastructure delivers:

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Pythian Delivers Indy 500 Performance to Rakuten LinkShare’s Fortune 500 Clients

Maryanne Birksted — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:21:20 +0000

To address growth and expanding service offerings, Rakuten LinkShare wanted to deploy a data infrastructure that could provide global access to data quickly with a user-friendly interface, while being able to scale easily for future growth.

Rakuten LinkShare provides Fortune 500 businesses with a wide range of online marketing services, including search engine marketing, lead generation and affiliate marketing. Rakuten LinkShare has significantly enhanced the performance and availability of its reporting and analysis services for hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers in its network. Rakuten Linkshare provides Fortune 500 businesses with a range of online marketing services, including search engine marketing, lead generation, and affiliate marketing.

Problem
Rakuten Linkshare required the ability to easily manage huge volumes of historical e-commerce data in a consolidated database that could be scaled for future growth. Rakuten Linkshare also needed to meet the needs of its advertisers and publishers as it continued to expand globally and as online advertising and e-commerce grew. Another requirement was to deploy flexible reporting and analysis tools, including a sophisticated dashboard functionality for its business users.

Solution
Rakuten Linkshare and Pythian developed a comprehensive implementation and deployment plan. The database infrastructure comprised Oracle Exadata machines with Oracle Database and Real Application Clusters (RAC) to deliver the best performance-to-dollar value. They adopted Oracle Enterprise Manager to keep their transactional databases running smoothly, identify trouble spots, and isolate bad queries.

To provide easy access to the data, including an in-depth set of query and analysis tools, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition was employed with a user-friendly interface built on top. A post-deployment management plan was developed to leverage Rakuten Linkshare employees’ existing Oracle transactional environment experience to streamline database and systems management teams and improve operational efficiency.

Results
Pythian delivered performance, usability, and scalability that exceeded the client’s demands. Processing efficiency and database query speed were increased by 8 times, while data center floor space and power requirements were reduced by 400%. As a result, response times for customer queries were cut in half.

By using an application built on top of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, advertisers and publishers had direct access to data through a user-friendly interface, enabling them to assess trends, analyze historical data, and view the performance of their campaigns in near real-time.

Thanks to Pythian, Rakuten Linkshare was able to significantly enhance the performance and availability of its reporting and analysis services for hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers in its network.

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Pythian helps FreshDirect deliver exceptional customer experience

Maryanne Birksted — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:43:54 +0000

Company: FreshDirect – New York City, NY, USA
Market: Retail
Technology:
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

Offering online grocery shopping and next-day delivery service, FreshDirect has become one of New York’s success stories. The company has more than 6,000 different fresh food and grocery items and in a given day will process between 4,000 and 10,000 orders. When clients started experiencing significant log-in delays, FreshDirect turned to Pythian, to address the issue quickly.

Situation

Today, FreshDirect’s production environment involves more than 40 databases, including more complex technologies such as Oracle RAC and Automatic Storage Management (ASM). The rapid growth of applications and new e-commerce functionalities continues to challenge the team at FreshDirect. In one particular situation, some FreshDirect users had been experiencing accumulative login delays. The more times an individual consumer ordered, the longer it took him or her to log on; sometimes up to 60 seconds longer. For any e-commerce site, this is critical as the overall user experience is tied directly to whether or not the customer will continue and return for repeat business. With FreshDirect’s customer base of more than 250,000+ growing rapidly, they knew they needed to resolve their performance issues quickly.

Solution

Since databases are at the core of its business, FreshDirect turned to Pythian, its trusted database infrastructure support partner since 2005. While FreshDirect’s own monitoring tools hasn’t detected the issue, Pythian was able to quickly identify and remedy the problem. In the case of the accumulative login delay issue, Pythian advocated for and led a project to rewrite the user authentication process, which included application and database changes as well as database design elements.

Results

The results of the application and database changes resulted in a quantifiable improvement that no customer could miss. Log-in time was reduced to .5 seconds — 120 times faster. Throughout the years, Pythian has applied its breadth of knowledge to solve issues that fall within and outside of the scope of database administration. Because of the inherent advantages of the Pythian open-scope, flexible delivery model, FreshDirect is able to take advantage of economies of scale, resulting in a lower cost per database server. FreshDirect’s customers continue to benefit from a better overall customer experience and user reliability. Another advantage for FreshDirect is reduced costs through new efficiencies and noticeably improved operational reliability, which enables them to continue to focus on their core business: delivering the freshest and highest quality food products to their customers.

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When Every Minute Counts: Managed Database Services for Nordion

Maryanne Birksted — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:45:40 +0000

In the nuclear medicine business, time is of the essence. That’s why Nordion turned to Pythian to ensure around-the-clock availability of its mission-critical systems. By quickly responding to and fixing recurring issues missed by other DBAs, Pythian helped Nordion reduce its ongoing monitoring and support costs by $850,000 per year—freeing up valuable time and money for much-needed system upgrades.

Company: Nordion – Ottawa, Ontario
Market: Healthcare
Technology:
Oracle® Database
Oracle E-Business Suite
ERP

Nordion is a global health sciences company leading the market in products that prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, Nordion supplies targeted therapies, sterilization technologies, and medical isotopes that benefit the lives of millions of people in more than 60 countries around the world.

99.97% high availability
0 downtime through major transition
70% reduction in support costs

Situation

Unlike vaccines, medical isotopes can’t be stockpiled; their short half-lives render them ineffective in days or even hours. Because Nordion’s products must arrive exactly when they’re needed, any system downtime could result in missed shipments and lost business—and profoundly affect the lives of those depending on isotopes for advanced medical care. Nordion’s systems are as scrutinized as the products themselves—meaning they must be highly reliable and secure to comply with regulations limiting access to sensitive patient data. With no database administration resources of its own, Nordion relied on the capabilities of external partners to keep its systems available and secure. When response times started slipping to hours instead of minutes, Nordion called on Pythian to provide the support it needed.

Solution

Pythian’s flexible managed services offering allowed Pythian to immediately deliver the hands-on expertise and business-planning support Nordion required. For the first few months of the engagement, Pythian focused on resolving recurring incidents that had been leading directly to user dissatisfaction and unnecessary business risk—quickly demonstrating their ability to respond to and fix time-critical issues. After stabilizing the environment, Pythian was able to allocate unused time within the contract to proactively streamline Nordion’s processes and support structures.

“Pythian is the little tugboat among the big tankers—it has the agility to turn around quickly and get the job done. And as they gained more and more experience with us, our only question was: why would we ever even consider staffing DBAs internally?” -Ian Beaulieu, DBA Manager, Nordion

Result

Pythian created a highly available environment by increasing Nordion’s system uptime to 99.97% with only two hours of unplanned downtime in 2011. By focusing on automation, stabilization, and process improvements, Pythian discovered major efficiencies every year of the contract. By the third year of the engagement, Nordion reduced its database support costs from $1.2 million annually to just $350,000. Now, with less time and money spent on monitoring and management, Nordion can call on Pythian to provide additional, as-needed support on other data-critical projects, including upgrades to Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Database. To date, Pythian has been providing remote database administration for Nordion’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment since 2007, including the management of all facets of business continuity (backup and standby) for Oracle E-Business Suite and security for Oracle Database. When Nordion divested several of its businesses in 2010, Pythian’s scalable services and extensive experience with the company’s systems ensured continuity of service throughout the transition period. Pythian still provides operational support to many of the divested companies.

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Pythian Brings Performance and Scalability to Inpho’s Most Critical Applications

Maryanne Birksted — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 14:53:48 +0000

Company: Inpho Interactive – Alexandria, Australia
Market: IT
Technology:
Oracle
MySQL

The Performance Challenge

InPho engaged Pythian to conduct a remote database performance and tuning audit of the main Oracle database which supports InPho’s SMS gateway applications. The SMS batch process took upwards of 40 seconds to complete. This performance bottleneck forced InPho to compromise on the volume of SMS batches the SMS gateway could process. Customers and users were also frustrated by the poor performance during the update.

Solution
After completing the initial audit, Pythian found several major bottlenecks in the database architecture that were limiting the throughput of the main SMS batch process. To resolve the issue, Pythian used Oracle’s function-based indexes to allow the SMS batch process to complete much faster. Pythian conducted the necessary code change to the index structure and the programming changes to the Oracle PL/SQL packages. The entire operation was remotely coded, tested, and transitioned to production with no disruption.

Results
The SMS gateway application response times dropped from 40 seconds to 2 seconds per batch. Consequently, several of InPho’s customers noted the dramatically improved performance and responsiveness of the application.

The Service Availability Challenge

InPho had several new SMS, Chat and IVR applications and different versions of MySQL to balance as it rolled out these new applications. All of these news services needed to scale gracefully and offer redundancies in the event of a server failure. Pythian was engaged to audit the runtime environment to reduce service delivery risk.

Solution
Working with the InPho team, Pythian’s MySQL experts determined the business and scaling requirements for the new applications. With that understood, Pythian then provided detailed guidance on structuring their MySQL database architecture to deliverable performance and availability under load. To ensure scalability, Pythian recommended the separation of applications onto individual servers and MySQL instances. For cost-effective redundancy, Pythian recommended a secondary slave server running multiple MySQL slave instances that also ran specific MySQL versions as required by each application.

Results
InPho’s new SMS, Chat and IVR applications run within a MySQL database architecture, which is both application centric and scalable. The new environment offers cost-effective redundancy and can scale with virtually no disruption. InPho engaged Pythian to remotely implement the recommended solution and to continue monitoring the environment on a 24×7 basis.

“Throughout the many years of our relationship, Pythian has been instrumental in maintaining our most critical applications. We’ve come to rely on their expertise for our daily support.”
- Graeme Campbell Technical Director, Operations

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Pythian Helps Grasshopper Scale without Compromising Customer Satisfaction

Maryanne Birksted — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:02:42 +0000

Company: Grasshopper – Needham, Massachusetts, USA
Market: Retail

Fast growth was putting a strain on Grasshopper’s database infrastructure, causing performance bottlenecks in their customer reporting application that resulted in delays up to 40 minutes. Grasshopper looked to Pythian for a solution.

9 second customer report execution times, reduced from 40 minutes to 9 seconds
90% cost reduction compared to the original project cost estimate
Long term savings in ongoing software maintenance costs

Since 2003, Grasshopper has been offering entrepreneurs and small businesses across North America access to an affordable, cloud-based, virtual phone system that helps them sound more professional and stay connected from anywhere. Siamak Taghaddos and David Hauser, who originally launched the company as GotVMail, bootstrapped their way to profitability quickly and now drive $10 million in annual revenue. Keeping up with that kind of growth meant being able to scale their underlying service delivery platform at the lowest possible cost, without compromising customer satisfaction.

Situation
Grasshopper’s successful growth and customer acquisition were putting a strain on their database infrastructure. Customer reports were taking too long to return—sometimes resulting in delays of up to 40 minutes—and overall service was slow as the system began to experience performance bottlenecks during peak use.

Solution
Pythian was asked to audit the existing reporting application and make recommendations on how to resolve the underlying performance bottlenecks. During the audit, Pythian quickly identified the application responsible for the performance concerns.

The next step was to review the software causing the performance issues and evaluate the data structures underlying the application. They determined that the optimal and most cost-effective way forward was to rebuild the application logic that generates the reports. Rather than executing application code, the reports were rewritten using SQL and the underlying data structures were optimized for fast query results.

Result
Pythian’s recommendations and actions netted demonstrable improvements in reporting speed, exceeding Grasshopper’s performance expectations and costing only 10% of what was initially proposed. In some cases, reports that used to take over 40 minutes to execute were now returning in less than 9 seconds. As an additional benefit, the rewritten reporting application required little to no maintenance, saving Grasshopper the ongoing software maintenance costs the original vendor was charging.

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Pythian Helps Fox Sports Eliminate Time-Sensitive Delays

Maryanne Birksted — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:16:52 +0000

Company: Fox Sports – Los Angeles, CA, USA
Market: Entertainment/Media
Technology:
Oracle PL/SQL
Oracle Database Server

With game day web requests exceeding 40,000 per second, response times for Fox Sports fantasy games are critical to user experience. Increasingly slow response times saw Fox Sports make the play for an effective solution.

Situation

Fox Sports Fantasy Football and other related games are some of the world’s most played sports pool games. On game day, site traffic can reach over 40,000 requests per second. The games give sports fans the opportunity to create their own leagues and manage their own teams based on the real-world performance of the players. Sports statistics are the foundation on which players choose their team rosters. Each player in the NFL has a complete set of statistics. The Fantasy Football Player Page gives subscribers access to the entire set of players in a unified interface with their entire collection of statistics (touchdowns, running yards, passing yards, etc).

Once the web client has all this information, a subscriber can sort and compare players. When this is initiated, 1MB of data is transferred between the Fox Sports server and the end-user web client, a process that can take over a minute, delaying the time it takes to immerse a user in the full Fox Sports experience. Sixty seconds is a long time when it comes to gaming or any other web service people use today. To optimize revenue, free web games must keep their users engaged and wanting more. A slow web site or sub-optimal performance can negatively impact visitor volume and advertising revenue.

Solution

FoxSports asked Pythian to review the entire Player Page module from a high level, and then drill down to the details to determine how performance could be improved. This holistic approach gave Pythian the ability to review the application business logic, which helped them understand the application, database, web client relationship, and required performance criteria. Based on the review, Pythian recommended the application be modified to process the end-user server statistics in the Oracle database server instead of the web client. Pythian then gathered all of the business logic and worked with the developers to modify the Java UI and PL/SQL database code.

Result

FoxSports Fantasy Football response times for the Player Page dropped from over one minute for the initial load to below one second. Java UI code was greatly simplified since much of the logic was removed. All sorting and other business requirements were rolled into a single database SQL call. Once the modifications were complete, previous delays were resolved, greatly improving end-user experience.

Tower International witnesses a flawless migration to its new Oracle RAC cluster

Maryanne Birksted — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:14:10 +0000

Company: Tower International – Livonia, MI, USA
Market: Automotive
Technology: Oracle RAC Linux

Tower International is a global automotive parts supplier that competes in a highly cost-conscious business environment. It wanted to achieve the significant cost savings associated with server consolidation through virtualization and database cluster software.

• Reduced redundancies in IT and PeopleSoft applications across the organization
• Offset availability risks associated with complex networking and cluster software

Situation

Tower International is a leading global manufacturer of engineered automotive structural metal components and assemblies, specializing in body-structure stampings, frames, and complex welded assemblies. To lower its operational costs, Tower International consolidated its global Peoplesoft applications and data into a centralized environment. However, the new Peoplesoft environment needed to serve global operations, not just North American users—introducing high availability and complex migration requirements.

Tower’s IT management team recognized the risks associated with moving to a consolidated, highly available, clustered server environment. They also realized there was a knowledge gap between Tower’s existing staff and service vendors when it came to migrating to the new environment, and a lack of in-house expertise to tune and troubleshoot complex cluster configurations. Because their PeopleSoft applications were business critical, Tower could not afford any downtime during the migration.

Solution

Working alongside Tower and its third-party service provider, Pythian was engaged to lead the planning and execution of the cluster environment migration. Pythian sent an on-site implementation team to develop the migration strategy and set up a production cluster infrastructure. During that time, Pythian mentored Tower employees on Oracle RAC implementation and operational best practices. Once implemented, the Pythian team provided remote support for the migration to the new platform and continues to provide proactive and reactive services related to the production Oracle RAC Linux cluster, including consolidation of a number of additional environments to the existing cluster.

Results

Tower International witnessed a flawless migration to its new Oracle RAC cluster for its Peoplesoft applications. By retaining Pythian for ongoing Oracle RAC support, it has a specialized and focused set of resources that plays a key role in maintaining system availability. This comes at a fraction of the in-house cost of hiring and retaining a specialized Oracle RAC DBA. Tower International took full advantage of the cost savings of system consolidation without compromising on key skills needed to maintain system availability.

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