BOTCC Case Study

Clearing House Plans Oracle Upgrade to Prepare for Future Revenue Growth

The Project Impetus

Strapped with a part-mainframe, legacy platform, a major Mid-west clearing house needed to create a more cost-effective and flexible clearing system for the future. Revenue growth depended greatly upon their capacity to be ready and able to clear non-traditional trading instruments as they came into existence in the market place – the quicker the better.

Having acquired several Sun servers and storage hardware, along with VERITAS Clustering Software to run their current Oracle Database, they decided to upgrade to the new Oracle 9i RAC platform.

Clearly PDC Was the Best Solutions Provider for the Job

With a five-year track record of successful consulting and solutions implementation with the client, PDC was the most qualified and best suited solutions provider for the job. On top of that, PDC has forged a strong strategic alliance and working relationship with TUSC, a highly experienced Oracle Certified Partner. TUSC engineers added significantly to the PDC professional services solution offering. And finally, PDC’s proposal also proved to be very cost competitive on the hardware side.

The Deliverables

As soon as the job was let, PDC geared up to design and build the production environment. The resulting infrastructure built by PDC would result in a platform outfitted for the installation of the Oracle software. Upon completion of the production environment, PDC handed it over to the client’s IT professionals to install the Oracle 9i RAC and begin work on the test environment.

Once the Oracle 9i RAC install had been performed by the client, PDC tested failover of the production environment.. Both the production and test environments were built in such a manner that a third node could be added to the cluster to satisfy anticipated future growth.

PDC and their partners fully documented all work performed in the Sun Server installation as well as for the configurations of the production and test environments. And lastly, a complete knowledge transfer and training for client personnel on the project equipment was completed.

Benefits Realized -- Scalable and Available

Most critical to the client was the ability to scale operations to meet demand while achieving the highest availability that was technically feasible with the new infrastructure. This was the impetus for implementing clustering technologies which have a reputation for achieving high availability and scalability by minimizing potential problems caused by:

  • Server failure
  • Network or I/O path failures
  • Application growth (easy to add additional servers as need arises)
  • Management cost (clusters provide flexible platform for running multiple applications while allowing the cluster to be managed as a single system.

Additional benefits realized with the new infrastructure include:

  • Zero downtime to scale systems
  • Automated load balancing across systems
  • No application rewrites
  • Fast and accurate failure detection
  • Rapid reconfiguration
  • Minimal service interruption

HW/SW Specifics

PDC configured and installed for their client:

  • Redundant Sun Fire 480R servers
  • Sun 3910 StorEdge storage enclosure
  • VERITAS DBE for 9i RAC clustering software
  • Oracle 9i Enterprise Edition with Oracle 9i Real Applications Clusters

“Standard” configurations which were factory-integrated and interoperability-tested to reduce complexity, helped to significantly reduce downtime during implementation by allowing for rapid deployment.

Poised for Growth

No matter what new index, commodity, derivative or financial instrument comes down the road, PDC has cleared the path for their client to become a major player.