Reference group of companies Achim Niederberger
"Our new 64 Database solution offers against the previous solution a significantly higher performance, stability and availability from which all employees of a company profit. The improvements conducted in 10g Release 2 simplify the administration considerably and allow the IT department to focus on its core tasks. With entering the 64 Bit technology based on HP Servers with AMD Opteron Technology, the foundation was laid for the further growth of our infrastructure for the coming years.“ - Axel Halkow, Database Administrator, Group of Companies Achim Niederberger.
As leading company for sport, outdoor and mobile advertising, the group of companies Niederberger supports with more than 1.000 employees more than 30.000 associations, cities, communities and social facilities in Europe. All of these activities are coordinated and administrated from the company’s headquarters in Neustadt an der Weinstraße via different Software solutions, e.g. for the Order Management, Call Center Management, CRM, Accountancy, Financial Management and Staff Management. Up until now, the data management was carried out on an Oracle 4 Node RAC 10g Release 1 under Red Hat Linux 32 Bit technology, which had also proved itself in the past years.
Due to the strong growth of the group of companies and the resulting necessity to change to a more powerful and updated Hardware (expiration of maintenance contracts), the long-term Oracle partner, the company Information Systems Engineering GmbH (ISE) with its headquarters in Gräfenberg near Nuremberg, was assigned to establish and implement an according concept.
Cost-effective Cluster solution
ISE recommended to change the database infrastructure to 64 Bit technology and to use AMD Opteron CPUs with DualCore technology, since multiple cores are regarded as single CPU on a socket of x86 architecture based CPUs when licensing the Oracle Standard Edition and are therefore in comparison very price-competitive. The AMD CPUs have proved in different tests with popular Hardware manufacturers – such as Dell, FSC, HP and IBM – their predominance concerning capacity and stability compared to the previously used and current Intel CPUs.
Together with ISE the previous solution was improved. The 32 Bit operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 3 was replaced by the current 64 Bit variation Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4, the Oracle RAC version was updated from 10.1.0.4 (32 Bit) to 10.2.0.3 (64 Bit). The four existing Server knots were replaced by four HP DL 385 with one respective AMD Opteron 285 DualCore CPU and 16 GB RAM. The data were transferred from a MSA Storage unit to a CLARiiON CX3-20. In doing so, the memory management has proved itself with the Automatic Storage Manager (ASM), which is a requirement for the use of an Oracle RAC Standard Edition anyway. Furthermore, in doing so, the hitherto Single Instance Stand-By-System could also be changed to a 2-Node-RAC, so that the failure security could be improved as well.
Beside the familiar high availability, the new system offers essentially more capacity and reserves for the future. With this system the IT department is able to meet the continuous growing demand of an expanding group of companies for the next years. Stability problems, which can occur under strong demand, are now problems of the past.
Well-prepared for the future
At the location Neustadt an der Weinstraße, currently about 500 users are working with this solution, whereby about 200 employees are connected to the internet. Already today, the group of companies Achim Niederberger is employing more than 1.000 collaborators. In the future, further locations in Germany and abroad are to be set up, whereby in the near future again more than 200 users are to be added.
Due to the scalability, the existing solution can be expanded technically without problems, so that nothing gets in the way of an expansion of the IT infrastructure.
Why Oracle?
For more than 17 years already, the group of companies Achim Niederberger uses Oracle Databases in the field of business critical Software. Since the company is still convinced by the stability, reliability and efficiency of Oracle products, a change is out of the question. No other supplier is at the moment offering more flexibility in the field of operating system choice and database performance at the price of the Standard Edition.
Why ISE?
ISE offers services in the field of IT infrastructure and Software development and has as long-term partner of Oracle and Novell comprehensive experience with the products of these companies available. As, in addition, ISE has successfully realized other projects with similar targets, the company was the ideal partner for the group of companies Achim Niederberger. With ISE the group of companies has a competent and reliable partner on its side, who plans, realizes and looks after efficient and practicable solutions.
back