Manufacturing
All Case Studies
10 min

Reducing Oracle License Costs and Improving Application Performance

-20%
Licensing costs
Savings on Oracle license renewal costs
-91%
Shorter execution times
Shorter execution times for critical procedures: a procedure that used to take 8 hours now completes in just 45 minutes.
100%
Operations and management
Nutanix, combined with correct sizing of the Oracle workloads, delivers faster response times and online (hot) updates with minimal maintenance windows. The more resilient platform has also made day-to-day management smoother, thanks to a unified interface and the automation of routine tasks, to the satisfaction of users.
Context

Boero is a long-established company (in business since 1831) that produces paints, varnishes, and coating materials for construction and the marine sector, especially yachts. Since 2021 it has been part of CIN, a Portuguese group with which it joined forces to expand its presence in the global market.

The starting point was an IBM Z machine running Linux that hosted all of the company's Oracle Enterprise Edition databases. This mainframe delivered license savings of up to 70%, but it made hardware maintenance and integration with existing systems very costly. The setup had several limitations:

  • a cloud path locked into IBM environments (technology lock-in);
  • the complexity of implementing disaster recovery;
  • mainframe-style management that was not user-friendly, with no way to apply online software updates;
  • long downtime windows during updates or restarts, which caused considerable problems for a company whose production and logistics departments run around the clock. 
Problems

The client described difficulties caused by technological and operational limitations that had a significant impact on the business:

  • Risk of business downtime due to long restart times after incidents.
  • Greater complexity in day-to-day management and maintenance processes.
  • Delays in critical operations and difficulty integrating new technologies.
  • Frequent maintenance windows with a negative impact on business activities.
  • The company therefore needed a solution that supported online updates, simpler disaster recovery, and full backups/snapshots of its virtual machines.

The company therefore needed a solution that supported online updates, simpler disaster recovery, and full backups/snapshots of its virtual machines.

Solution

Boero turned to Miriade because it was looking for a more modern solution for its databases. After a thorough analysis of its needs, Miriade first carried out a feasibility analysis of downgrading the Oracle Enterprise licenses. After confirming through benchmark tests that there would be no subsequent performance issues with the Standard license, which does not include parallel execution, the team designed a migration to a Nutanix platform, with virtualized databases and Oracle Standard licensing. 
The project was organized in 3 phases:

  • Feasibility study: analysis of the databases to confirm that they could move from Oracle Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition.
  • Benchmark: performance tests to make sure performance would be maintained with the Standard license. The tests were run on a virtualized test infrastructure.
  • Rapid migration: setup of the Nutanix cluster, with installation and migration of all company databases completed in 43 days, for a total of 15 instances and 1 TB of data. Operational downtime was limited to 1 day, in line with business timelines.
Technologies

With Miriade, Boero turned a limiting, outdated infrastructure into a modern, high-performing, and reliable solution, improving day-to-day operations and making management more secure and simpler, with estimated savings of 20% on Oracle license renewal costs. This result was achieved through work on the following technologies.

  • Database: Oracle Database Standard Edition, downgraded from Enterprise features that were no longer needed, with licenses calculated on the cores actually in use.
  • Virtualization platform: Nutanix AOS (hyperconverged infrastructure) keeps compute and storage close together, ensuring low latency and horizontal scalability.
  • Assessment tools: SolarWinds DPA for profiling Oracle access and verifying the features in use.
  • Benchmarking and monitoring: performance tests on VMware and Nutanix clusters; dashboards for continuous post-migration monitoring.
  • Backup & DR: Nutanix VM-level snapshots, point-in-time restore, and simpler failover than on the mainframe.

Dicono di noi

What first struck me about Miriade was its technology-agnostic approach: focused on results, not on technology. During the project, they impressed me with an approach that was structured yet flexible, able to adapt quickly to new requirements. I am extremely satisfied with their contribution to this project.
Giulio Sosio IT Manager at Boero