Oracle OpenWorld 2018 - Wells Fargo and Halliburton reap the benefits of consolidating on Oracle Exadata
- Summary:
- Although operating in two very different industries, both Wells Fargo and Halliburton spoke about not only cost savings, but operational benefits, in consolidating their hardware and software onto Oracle Exadata.
Oracle Exadata was introduced as part of Oracle’s ‘engineered systems’ products, which essentially are optimised for running Oracle hardware and software. Exadata aims to allow enterprises to remove the headache of managing multiple servers, networks, storage, and placing them into one highly engineered, optimised stack.
Speaking this week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, David Sivick, technology initiatives manager at Wells Fargo, and Shane Miller, senior director of IT at Halliburton, both explained how their separate companies embarked on projects to reduce infrastructure cost and complexity by moving to Oracle Exadata.
For instance, Wells Fargo now operates on approximately 70 racks of Exadata, which replaced thousands and thousands of Dell servers. And whilst the bank has seen performance gains, it was a reduction in complexity that appealed. Sivick said:
We’ve realised a multi-million dollar a year saving. The applications we are putting through this, there’s a 78% improvement in wait times, 30% improvement on batch, 36% reduction in space from compression and an overall application speed improvement of 33%. And honestly, that’s not the main reason we did it. We weren’t looking for performance, what we were looking for was the fact that we had so many separate system builds. We had variations of builds between OS, database, hardware, chipset and memory.
Sivick said that the automation is the reason for the dramatic increases in performance. He warned that whilst Exadata can take longer to get up and running initially - if running on premise (because you’ve got to get the machine in) - the performance gains once live are worthwhile.
Wells Fargo now has 93% of its databases in Exadata, and the ones that are not on there are not considered to be “strategic”, or will soon be retired.
Halliburton has had a similar experience. Miller said that the speeds and performance that the company is seeing now, compared to their traditionally fragmented infrastructure, are far superior. He said:
We did see some cost savings as well. We had different compute, from different storage, multiple different versions of storage, multiple different operating systems. We ran into the problem -‘it’s the storage fault, it’s the network fault, it’s the whatever fault’. How do you diagnose that? That was a big problem for us. We had significant performance problems on many of our applications.
As we move those to Exadata, those problems really went away. We use this a lot for our operational data storage, so they’re not necessarily super high volume transactional, but the speed is really important when we do data loads for month end close and things like that. We saw a 25% reduction in the time it takes to close at the end of the month. We saw load times from 6 hours to like 15 minutes. It’s engineered and ready for it, so it works.
Miller said that Halliburton has been on a journey to reduce the cost of infrastructure over the last five to seven years, and over that time period, has seen infrastructure run costs come down 50%. He added that whilst this isn’t entirely down to Exadata, it is “absolutely part of the story”.
Miller largely put these cost savings down to operational gains, rather than licensing savings. He said:
There are opportunities to save on licensing costs when you move to Exadata, for sure. But a lot of it for us was just operational cost. If you’re managing hundreds of servers, plus networks, plus storage. And then you get a meltdown you’ve got to go touch hundreds of firmwares. But if we had a problem with Exadata, it’s one system, boom, done.
There are significant operational savings and datacentre footprint savings. For us, every project we do that is IT-centric has to be self-funding. We don’t make an investment unless I get to take the equivalent cost out of the run rate.
Challenges
Sivick said that if you’d mentioned Exadata at Wells Fargo in 2014, “you’d probably get fired”. However, after a new CIO came on board and pushed for the system to be introduced, the bank has since taken it on wholeheartedly. He said:
We had a waterfall moment. It was like a drug. Nobody wanted to go, nobody wanted to go. But you get that first or second application on, you’re seeing all these improvements, you don’t have to touch the code, and everything is moving. At that point, everybody wants to come on.
However, this doesn’t come without its challenges. Sivick said that organisations undertaking a similar project should be prepared to manage a complicated migration and to clean up their existing application footprint. Sivick advised:
I think one of the biggest challenges we had was - how do we fit these 5,400 databases on 66 Exadatas and not have them collide with each other. We brought in Oracle Consulting and they’ve got a mapping programme, we put in our rules and mapped that to each database.
The second was, we had to clean a lot of application debt from teams that own their own servers. The biggest challenge was cleaning up that application debt.
Miller said that bringing the business and the technical teams along on the journey, making them feel comfortable with Exadata, was the main challenge for Halliburton.
I was thinking about the lessons learned when we rolled this out. And one of them was, there wasn’t a really clear business strategy. The business wasn’t necessarily asking for this. The other thing was that there was a concern about training, there was a lot of infrastructure people that were very concerned about this.
I think the A-ha moment was when they didn’t really need training. They just kind of stood up, moved databases in, it worked, that became a real infrastructure push for us, not a business push. [They realised] that this is a way we can drive a significant amount of efficiency in our workloads. There were very few challenges. There were fears, uncertainties and doubts, but it went very smoothly for us.
And the project has clearly been a success, as Halliburton is already considering moving its Exadata systems to the public cloud. Oracle offers a ‘Customer at Cloud’ solution too, which is subscription based and managed by Oracle, but essentially still sits on premise. Miller thinks that the company may jump that step and go straight to the public cloud. He said:
We are trying to decide if we need to do Customer at Cloud, or if we dive in and go all in straight cloud. That’s the debate we are having now. In our industry we see massive growth that comes really, really fast. And we see the opposite of that as well.
At the end of 2014 we 85,000 employees, at the end of 2016 we had 50,000 employees. It has wild swings. The ability to not have that fixed cost sitting on the floor is really beneficial.